We get asked this often and it is sometime possible to do but it does cause us an admin headache as firstly it is outside our components quality process which usually means disclaimers and warranty limitations on anything manufactured. It is also something we won't do small scale because of the admin involved. Until we have a working design it also something we would not want to get into as immediately customers tend to have delivery time expectations. That is something we currently don't want to have to promise as it impacts our other business activities. 

Cairnsmore4 firmware development and testing is still in progress and we won't announce prices, specs, or timescales etc. until we are actually ready to ship this product in a customer usable form. If are at the point of buying other Bitfury based kit I would carry on with your plans until we have a much more solid offer for customers. 

Coming after we start to push out Cairnsmore4 mega systems to customers is this little baby hashing unit. It is for the little guy. No prices and specifications yet and we won't annouce those until we are ready to take orders which is probably going to be late October.

Actually indirectly we have already done a 1024 memory interface/FPGA in our HPC product Merrick4 that has 1024 bit memory interface and 16GB of local DDR3. What is different here is that this is done with 16 S6 FPGAs working together. Cost base is also expensive before anyone asks.

Once we have more time we will look at the viability of doing Litecoin on all of our HPC products. There are some better that than Merrick4 in the pipeline that have much more memory bandwidth and will trash GPUs in many applications and quite possibly Litecoin too.

We don't think the memory solution for CM1 will be the most optimal Litecoin solution possible with FPGAs and interconnect bandwidth may be, or not, somewhat of a limitation. There is a local FPGA with the memory that may help in this solution. Whilst we think CM1s will remain profitable (more earning than electric cost) in Bitcoin mining for some time to come yet but we would like to see the many CM1 owners with a way forward with their boards into Litecoin.

We don't have them yet in final form but all the elements for the accessing the memory have been done before by the team before so I would anticipate we could get that knocked together into a workable form some time in September.

Someone made the comment that GPUs are ASICs. If you are working on that basis FPGAs are also ASICs. However it is worth saying that FPGAs can often compete with, and often beat, GPUs albeit usually with a different structural approach. Outside maybe a few people already working on FPGA Litecoin solutions I doubt anyone actually has the knowledge to say which will be better - GPU or FPGA at the moment. Our point here is that there is a awful lot of CM1s out there with potentially nothing to do in maybe 6-12 months time when we foresee Bitcoin being no longer profitable and provided CM1s operate in profit no reason not to do Litecoin at whatever level a CM1 can achieve.

I will also say that anyone having a serious attempt to do a Litecoin solution should talk to us partly so we know what is happening but it will also allow us to offer some limited help maybe technically or even some form of financial reward for a solution. On the latter this might be royalty (say based on memory module sales), or a straight payment in some form, or even a bounty. We have not discussed this or set anything up yet so I can't say more at this point about what we might do.

Part of our strategy here is to be able to adapt with the fast moving market and even visually CM4 looks very much like CM3. No idea yet if CM5-10 will follow the same chip patterns but there will be similarities in their structures seen in those boards. With the controller module as a plug in can get carried over to the next design and in extreme cases you might scrap a CM3 main board and replace with say a CM5 main board reusing the Controller and saving some cost in the upgrade. We also have plans for the Controller and the second release with probably be very different from the first. At the moment this is about keep timescales and what we can actually deliver.

The 400-500 GH/s chips still have to be proven as working and actually practical to use. Currently there are more questions than answers on these but of course we will look at them when it is relevant to do so.

On Litecoin we do have a memory add-on for CM1 going into manufacture. I don't want anyone to think we have Litecoin mining now running on CM1. We don't and won't for at least some time to come give our current workload. This new module will simply be available anyone that wants to try and implement it on a CM1. On the big boards we will come back to Litecoin at some point but no promises when that might be.

Just something of a little update. Please don't email/PM asking for more details of specification and pricing as we are on shutdown until Sepember (apart from a small number of people working on CM3/CM4 designs). We also won't say any more until announced in this thread. There is also not a definate time frame for availability as this will depend in part on chip availability that is beyond our control.

There won't be pre-orders for these systems now. They will simply be offered for sale when they are more or less ready to ship.

Cairnsmore3 - We have this design now integrated with of revision1 Goliath Controller and basically debugging the design. We expect to complete that in the next couple of weeks. We will build boards with the Avalon chips we already have following that. Given recent announcements by Avalon we hope to migrate this design to their gen2 chips but we don't have enough technical data yet to say that definately will be a smooth transition.

On the subject of chips we will be offering to buy chips via known supply chains e.g. Sebastian Ju and Zefir at prices to be determined by our view of market conditions. Don't contact us, or the guys, on that directly until we make something more of a formal announcement. We will set it up with the relevant people and the offer will come from them only if they wish to participate in this.

Cairnsmore4 - As some you have already guessed we have changed the CM4 concept to being based on Bitfury chips. We plan to have first hardware on the bench next week but there will be a lot of work still to do on this. We think the design will offer between 360 and 800 GH/s per board but until we do the work that isn't definate as a spec. Time frame for availability is very much down to the next deliveries of Bitfury chips.

Outside of these products we may have something for the small setup as well but more on that later. We will start a seperate thread for that when ready.

We will continue to work with ASIC suppliers as new chips appear to provide successor products in this range.

Manufacturing is always much harder than people think when they start so I can understand why both Avalon and BFL have difficulty in making actual hardware. Whatever issues Avalon have in making units, or if they delay shipping chips because of batch3, it will all be totally irrelevant with the newer generations of chips arriving as they appear to be in the next few weeks.  

Possibly we will but it is kind of academic until we have a product ready to launch. For now we will quitely continue our developments of Cairnsmore3 and the new concept of Cairnsmore4. We now won't take advance orders on these until they are actually working and proven. When we are there we will then look at the market and decide if there is viable pricing structure for us to bother with selling units or simply fed our own mining requirements.

I'm sure that a lot people will want to see more data on them working and we will do our small part here to move that forward. However it is worth saying that the initial results by people, that have prototypes, have shown a power efficiency miles better than BFL. So even if these chips are only run at 1-2 GH/s per chip it gives a good power figure and a high packing potential. If 5 GH/s is achieved that is a big bonus.

Our aim will be to continue with bigger rig concepts. Work on CM3 continues albeit at a slower pace and we are also looking at an alternative concept for the CM4 slot which might be quite interesting but needs much less work to complete. What we don't want to put down at the moment is anything like a fixed timescale until we are more or less ready with whatever of the concepts makes the grade.

15% commission does not seem like a good deal to me other than for the dealer. Point is it is daft to go to BTC from flat for that only to be put back to flat by the seller especially on larger amounts. Like it or not chips still have to paid for in flat currency and until that changes artifical expensive use of BTC isn't really a benefit.

Not so good if you have a limited range/size of exchanges as we have in the UK. Probably adds a 10% loader to the cost base most of which goes to our favourite banks one way or another. Having a SEPA/bank transfer option would be good particularly if you are considering a large purchase.

Is there a source of technical details?

If we were reasonably ready on a Litecoin miner IP design we would probably have carried on. CM4 still makes sense for that market but to be honest being short on people we had to let something go in the short term. Hopefully we can come back to this when we are less stretched. For the shorter term we will continue with the plan to manufacture a memory add-on for CM1. That doesn't mean we will have time to do much on Litecoin IP in Q3 but it will hopefully enable anyone that does want to have a go at a Litecoin design. Depending on what else is happening we will try and look at Litecoin proper in Q4.

As to other technologies we are open to developing other members of this family based on whatever technology is available and appears to be viable as a project. Once we have the Controller module sorted out with Cairnsmore3 most of that work will be reusable into any new board designs. There are going to be several months of instability in the ASIC marketplace and I would not be surprised if one, or more, of the companies offering solutions go out of business or withdraw from producing Bitcoin kit. During this period our main focus will be on our mainstream products and Bitcoin/Litecoin products will simply carry on in the background whilst the market sorts itself out.

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

No plans for a trade-in on CM1. Our original margin was so small that it isn't practical to do that. The difficult part for Litecoin is just having people to do the IP work but we can make the memory module available fairly easily. It will just be a derivative of our XC6SLX150 X1 Coprocessor and that makes the design time easy to find. It can offer up to 1GB of memory. The weakest part of this will be data link that will use the up/down connectors to pass data.

We are not fully sorted out on Goliath and still looking for replacement people to take on some of the work. That doesn't mean the project is stopped dead. It is just much slower than we would have been originally so no promises on timescales.

Did you mean the discount structure or when Bitcoin return falls to zero?

Discount structure is still in place.

If you mean Bitcoin return then that depends on your electricity cost and the Bitcoin exchange rate if you are measuring your return in flat currency, Bitcoin currency, or social gain. On the CM1s that I am running personally I estimate on my electricity cost and current exchange rate I will remain profitable until the network reaches to about 1500 TH/s if indeed it reaches that number. What will happen to the network size and exchange rates are a pure guess. I think we might hit an equlibrium or plateau on network size after August/September whilst people take stock of the expected market changes. That might last for 6 months. I expect at that some of the quick buck crowd, and any remaining GPU based miners, will dissappear from the network and it will settle down to something a little more normal. It is going to be interesting at that point as well because transaction processing could be very quick and that will further increase the use of Bitcoin maybe. I expect a period of gentle oscillation between usage growth and network growth.

We are going to offer a memory add-on to CM1 to help a potential Litecoin implementation running on CM1 and I expect if we do that and then either us or someone else does the Litecoin IP profit lifetime could be extended. It is only an well educated guess that the memory add-on will help a Litecoin mining implementation so don't use that fact for any financial analysis.

We are still working on a solution.

No not yet. This board is really about us testing out communications and results reporting. Also allows us to check out our schematic and pcb symbols and wire up before we build the expensive board. Performance I would expect as the data sheet.