Nope, half the power consumption isnt another class. Thats well within range of what any particular chip can do depending on voltage. Im pretty sure most current 28nm vendors could hit those efficiencies if they wanted to, albeit it at the expense of performance per chip. All thats needed is lowering the voltage and reducing the clock. Let me illustrate with a typical schmoo plot, showing the relationship between clock and voltage of whatever chip:



For this chip, maximum frequency is 1GHz and getting there requires 2V. If this plot applied to a bitcoin asic, most bitcoin mining vendors would probably pick around 1.85V for 900-950Mhz, since performance/$ is still far more important than per watt. Evidence of that is that most mining chips are only marginally overclockable, even if you seriously increase voltage/cooling. It simply makes more sense to pick a point at the high end of the curve today.

Now if you were to downclock that very same chip to, say, 400 MHz, you need only ~1V. Please note the relationship between voltage and and power draw is quadratic. So the 400GHz clocked chip,  would be almost twice as power efficient as the one clocked at 900 MHz.

This is exactly what bitmain did, and when the need arises, so will Cointerra, HF, KnC, Bitmine, BFL, and all the other 28nm vendors. 0.35W/GH at the chip level is nothing special.

ROFL. You really think those asics are made from pure gold dont you.

And now what makes you think spoonsomething's costs are anything special? For the record I estimated HF's golden nonce at ~$30 in non-packaged silicon production cost (324mm², $4000 per wafer, 80% yield). They seem to get ~800GH from that now (or soon, or sometime), thats less than $0.04/GH. And Im not using HF because I think their design is particularly good, its just the only one I have an official die size for atm.

No its not. Primary consideration for package type is its cost, pin count and power delivery. Of course you cant put a bigger die in a package than the package size, but 8x8mm packages are by far the most common and used billions of times (literally) for dies as small as 1-10mm². How big are the dies we are talking about here? Lets have a ballpark guess; HF is getting almost 2GH/mm² on 28nm. If we assume spoonsomething/AM get half that on their older process, then you are looking at ~10mm² dies. It may be 2 or 3x more or less, who knows, but that the package is 64mm² says close to nothing.

But notice how mr sp tech never denied their 40nm wafer costs being more expensive?
[/quote]

How could he? He doesnt have AM die size or wafer/packaging costs. Not that it matters to them, silicon production cost is only a tiny tiny fraction of overall miner cost/price for all vendors. 

Which is nearly as useful a metric as saying they both ship in 2U rackmounts...

Do you have die sizes of both chips, or what are you basing this on?

I did the excel sheet ages ago and the results are obviously not quite that simple, unless you assume free hardware (or an eternal break even time expectation).

They are now. Thats not the point, aerial radar isnt going to find that plane now. Point is that the chances of flight 370 entering radar coverage of a war ship during flight were actually very small, and the opposite is not at all surprising as phinn hinted at.

IIRC they did deviate a little bit to avoid the worst of a thunderstorm. But the point remains, that plane was flying along a known route, never disabled any electronics or communication, was flying over waters that are far more commonly used traderoutes, it still took 2 years to locate the black boxes. Also one of the reasons the airfrance crash site was found so "quickly" was that it was a modern airbus with lots of light weight composite materials. The entire tail, which is huge, just floated. Thats a tad easier to locate than some seat cushions.  By contrast, the older 777 hardly uses any composites and of course, we barely have any idea where it went down.

Clearly by having a UFO beam up that boeing in mid flight, they now at least control the people onboard that boeing. Makes complete sense when you think about it ?

Not that amazing once you realize how big that ocean is. Here for your sake, I painted a typical 250Km naval radar detection range as a red dot on the map:



Just how many naval task forces do you think are out there in the middle of nowhere?

Hi Josh!

Your math is way off. If the trend you pictured would continue we would see:
7B * 1.11^36 ~=300B

Of course it will level off at some point.


Mining hardware prices will continue to drop, and difficulty will continue to increase almost to the point where mining revenue equals electricity cost. Which is we know is really low in some places. Individual miners will continue miscalculating or betting on BTC price increase and therefore will continue getting raped.

So far, the sources for that appear to be hearsay by anonymous sources, but if confirmed, I'll drop my fire theory.


Dual suicide seems far fetched indeed, but its not very hard to come up with theories explaining a single suicide; while the captain or copilot is out of the cockpit (they go to the bathroom too you know), close the reinforced cabin door and depressurize the plane. ~15 minutes later you have a silent plane. As for why it would be a strange way, I disagree. In fact, its probably how I would do it if I was to take my own life and had no quarrels taking 200 innocents with me. Vanish and turn your cowardly act in to a possibly unsolvable mystery. I would find that more appealing that the thought that my children and family would view me as a murderer and coward.

As for the reason, one can of course only guess, but IIRC the captain's wife was divorcing him and she was moving out of the house that very day. He also had problems in his extramarital affair and apparently received a phone call from some woman minutes before the flight. His own daughter claimed the captain acted strangely and distant (http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/malaysia-airlines-flight-mh370-pilot-3303379) in the month leading up to the crash. There is this dogma on talking about pilot's suicide, but its happened before and it seems unthinkable no pilot will ever do it again:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/11/just-how-common-are-pilot-suicides/?tid=pm_national_pop


Randomlove doesnt think in or out the box. His brain is fried by too many drugs to think. Just click his ignore button.

Whats your source for these turns? AFAIK, nothing is known with any degree of certainty about the flight path after the transponder was shut down. Now Ive not followed this all that closely, so perhaps I missed it, but afaik, there have been a few unidentified radar contacts at the extreme end of radar range which may or may not have been flight 370, but what Ive seen so far is sketchy at best. If there is or will surface more convincing evidence that the plane made several turns hours after disappearing from radar, Ill gladly drop the fire/smoke theory, and revert to my original one: pilot suicide. In fact Ill entertain any other theories as well, as long as they are at least plausible, and some "men behind the curtains" covert plot to kill a few run of the mill ARM SoC engineers to obtain patent rights on some utterly trivial 'invention' those engineers did not even posses, is not among them.


To be clear, I was dismissing the altitude readings from radar returns, as they are notoriously unreliable, particularly at long range, so the story that the plane climbed above 45000 or whatever foot is anything but certain.  Positioning is of course quite accurate although all kinds of things can give false unidentified returns, from flocks of birds to thermals to whatever other plane.  Ive not seen anything that looks like a radar track, showing a plane flying at normal cruising speed (which kinda rules out birds or thermals) but as mentioned above, if that does exist and is reasonably certain to be from flight 370, I agree, then the plane must have been under control by a pilot.

"Aviate, Navigate, Communicate", in that order. I guess fighting fires comes even before that. So no one claims flight 370 "did not have time".  Its far more plausible they chose not to communicate, and instead chose to do the obvious thing and not waste time talking and instead tried to fix the problem asap, pulling fuses thereby disabling communication and transponder.  Its not because the Greek crew couldnt find their fuse box that this crew needed help with that.


Yeah, they need wings and a tail too. And thats about it. As for turning, apparently its beyond doubt the pilot initiated the turn. How does that invalidate a fire theory? Apart from trying to fight the fire, turning back to an airport is the second most urgent thing to do. Many will say its the first thing to do.


My theory is that flight 370 never lost control at all. The crew was incapacitated, but the plane itself may have been fine after they stopped the electrical fire.


Because that is precisely what planes do.


I dont know what path it followed exactly after the transponder was shut down. Does anyone? I think not. But if it did indeed fly a slightly erratic path, it would only serve as another argument in favor of incapacitated crew. A plane doesnt just fall from the sky when you release the controls, it will for the most part simply continue flying even without autpilot. Almost all pilot induced crashes are because the crew actively did something wrong, like slowing it down too much, steering in to the ground, or in to a mountain, or because they pulled too hard and stalled the plane, ..  not because they didnt do anything at all.  If only the pilots of Air France Flight 447 had done nothing, or simply released the controls at any point during their stall, instead of pulling the sticks non stop, it would have been fine.

A plane cruising at altitude will just fly on without any input. If it starts to pitch down it will gain speed, gain lift and therefore automatically pitch up again. ANd due to the wing incidence if it starts rolling in one direction it will automagically slowly level itself again. Planes that lost all hydraulic power, leaving the pilot with no input (besides throttle), have flown on for hours many times, and the opposite, the plane crashing shorty after losing hydraulics in a cruise flight,  has to my knowledge, never happened. In fact, at least one plane landed safely without any hydraulics, with the pilots only using differential throttle. A DHL flight over Iraq. That shows you dont need stick input to keep flying, aerodynamics take care of that. You only need stick input/autopilot to steer.

Alternatively if the plane flew straight and level all the way to the crash site, that doesnt invalidate the theory either, as its just as plausible the autopilot was not disabled by the fire or fuse pulling. The fire could have been found being caused by other circuitry like communications, or the fire may have disabled those but pilots restored power to the other circuitry. We have no way of knowing.


You will never find that, because if the fire truly rages out of control, it will eventually burn aluminium and composites and disintegrate. This is not a theory anyone is putting forward. Although I will add one thing; even a raging fire might be extinguished by depressurizing the plane at high altitude, since it will dramatically lower oxygen levels. Some radar plots suggest the plane climbed well above cruising altitude, and this might have been deliberate to starve a fire. Alternatively, it might have been caused by no one controlling the plane, pitching up and down is what you might expect in such scenario. That said, that radar altitude data is not at all reliable, so no one knows for sure if it did indeed climb that high.


And this is absolutely an identical event. Flight 522 is the closest you are going to find, and AFAICS, its absolutely identical with one exception: they did not disable communications. But since pulling fuses in reaction to inflight fire or cockpit smoke is standard procedure, was even attempted in the case of flight 522, I reallly dont get why you think this is such a leap of faith.


Of course not. How many accidents have happened exactly the same way plenty times in the past? I would hope none, thats why we have all this safety regulation, crash investigation, mandatory pilot training and what not. The sole purpose of that is to avoid making the same mistakes over and over. Thats why commercial planes crash on average only once every 4 million hours. Almost all accidents that are not blatant pilot error these days are freak coincidences of things that rarely if ever happened before. When looking for the cause of a crash, you are almost by definition looking for an unprobable (chain of) event(s).

They did contact the ground crew (but IIRC, they did not contact air traffic control, never sent out a panpan or mayday), but the problem was not fire as might be the case in flight 370, so there was no reason to cut power to the radio/transponder/etc (even though the last words of the captian were asking where certain fuses where, go figure). In case of an (electrical) fire, isolating the fire by turning off all electrical equipment is a lot more urgent than sending out a distress signal.


Why not? Engines need absolutely none of the electrical equipment in the fuselage. As I pointed out earlier, in the case of the Quantas Airbus A380 which had an engine explode, the crew did not manage to turn OFF another engine for several hours after landing, despite everything they tried, even hosing the engine with water from fire trucks. Once they run, engines only need fuel and they will keep running almost no matter what. Thats what they are designed to do.


I dont understand why you think this is weird or impossible? An electrical fire doesnt necessarily have to rage out of control, especially not if all fuses were pulled, no longer feeding of the fire. All you need to incapacitate the crew is smoke, and having shut down, or the fire disabling most of the electrical stuff, you'd have no airconditioning, no ventilation and perhaps even no continuing pressurization. Guess what happens next?


Who said the fire was viscous? Just how much plastic do you think needs to burn or smolder to intoxicate 200 people crammed together in a small room with no ventilation and low oxygen levels?


You know, there is a reason very few accidents happen more than once in an identical way. Its because we are maniacal about flight safety and from every crash we learn and make sure it doesnt happen again. Id be more shocked to find a strikingly similar accident had happened before.

You're the only jumping to conclusions based on not a shred of evidence, research or common sense, just outlandish conspiracies, self contradicting arguments and hearsay from crackpots. Let me guess, you believe in chemtrails and fake moonlandings too, right?

Nonsense. To develop an asic you need skilled system architecture, design and validation engineers, access to a fab and fab IP, etc, and last but not least, a shitload of money. Its definately something not anyone can make.

Immersion cooling otoh basically requires basic plumbing and a high tec cooling fluid, which is what 3M provides, not AM.

For a laugh, I googled on similar patents:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=optimizing+number+of+dies+#hl=en&q=optimizing+dies+wafer&tbm=pts

Looks like >250000 similar patents.