The "and give nothing in return" is the tricky part. Nobody gets as big as Bitmain by giving things out for free. May look like it, but they expect to profit somehow. Starting their own pool was just another means of getting more money in the first place, and I'll be darned if I'm gonna give anything to them.

I mean I owe Bitmain some thanks for selling me BM1384 chips in the first place, but pretty much everything else they've done in the last year and a half (crap hardware, crap support, price wars and price gouging, you name it) stinks quite a bit.

Anyways, independently designed and manufactured miners. Novak recently made the comment after hearing about all these projects - "you could basically remake the small miner market." That'd be okay; small miners have been staunchly ignored for most of the last two years.

Yeah, there's no gimmick that could ever get me to mine at antpool.

The 2-chip BM1384, I'll likely have a limited batch available in December. The 2-chip Bitfury stick won't come until later.

Unfortunately probably not until January for BF16 pods. Prototyping takes time and money - the more money, the less time.

Regarding short-term (BM1384, etc) projects - the 2-chip stick is definitely moving forward but I'm temporarily shelving the pod project. I may have access to some stock of a better chip which would make for a better end product at about the same price, which is never a bad thing. But it'll take longer to dev.
The 2-chip stick PCB is already laid out, and vh is busy making sure he can talk to two chips at once. I will probably be sending off for a short batch of PCBs first of next week.

Regarding Bitfury 16nm projects, I got shipping notification of my 2-chip testing PCB so I'll probably be playing with that early next week also. There's a lot of embedded code to do for it before I'll even be able to talk to the chips.

Tentative pricing for a Bitfury 16nm pod is around $125. My reseller friends are worried that >$100 is too much for a pod miner. With an estimated stock setting of about 650GH at 75W DC, would folks still buy it? That's priced high even by Avalon721 standards, but it also has better efficiency - and with integrated undervolting, it can get better still.

Good thing it's got a search function.

Dunno. It might already be spoken for. I'll be gone for Thanksgiving so nothing would go out until next Tuesday anyway, and I should know by then.

Not sure what shipping will be, but I'd like to get $30 each out of the PSUs.

He also got me tentative pricing for samples and batch chips, which is good so now I can start getting total cost ideas.

vh is hoping to have a functional multi-chip cgminer driver for BM1384 by this time next week. As soon as I have news that he's able to talk to two chips even in testing, I'll be sending off for sample PCBs of the two-chip stick and, if I have it laid out yet, the 15-chip pod.

Money raised by sales of these things will be funnelled into finishing dev on a 2-chip Bitfury stick, which since the controls on that are mostly identical with controls on the 11-chip pod and 33-chip S1 refit (intentionally), once the stick works fully we've done about 90% of the work required to make the rest.

The stick will probably roll out first, as the lowest cost to manufacture, and proceeds from that will be funnelled into pod and refit boards.

As my plan always is, I won't take in preorder money on a questionable product. As far as hardware goes, the 2-chip Compac is technically something I prototyped over a year ago and I had most of the 15-chip concept built (with 8 chips) and functional a year ago. So the hardware isn't a question. But in order to provide the best guarantee I can to my customers, that's why I'm waiting for vh to confirm the code. Once that's known it'll be time to open the gates.

BM1384 Compac manufacture, as some of you buyers in the past found out, wasn't always as time-efficient as I would have liked. You gotta remember, the first Compacs were literally the first things I ran out on my pick-and-place and I was just learning how to do it. Things go a lot smoother now, and I intend to bring in more equipment to help streamline things further - as well as some assistance to speed up a lot of the tedious work.

So, some good news today and I hope to have a lot more good news within the next week.

Got an email this morning from Punin.


So, looks like it's Game ON.

I run a 100KW datacenter off a custom pfsense box on a 3mbit synchronous line, and can stream netflix through it just fine.

I would guess the ASIC is cooked.

I highly doubt the S7 hack will work on an S9. Not sure how they alter the voltage but it's a different method, the parts required for the S7 hack to work aren't there.

It's secondhand, but I was told BW would start receiving the first batches of LK1403 in October. That was right about the same time I found out they wouldn't be selling to the public, which was right after I had a working prototype for a BW-based stickminer, including cgminer drivers, ready to roll.

(unless you own a Molex pin-crimping press and make PCIe cables as part of your job, then it's not easier at all)

BW has 14nm ASICs; from what I understand, they're already using their 3rd revision of 14nm (LK-1403) design.

I still like the loan address system, where anything paid in will be used for an initial batch and paid back once it's been earned from sales. Once that's set up, anyone who wants to help can do so freely.

Lead times probably won't be too bad. PCBs and heatsinks will be the worst of course; depending where I buy the PCBs and in what quantity, it'd be 2-4 weeks.

Yeah, the bottom-clock efficiency of the BM1385 at 28nm is only a little bit worse than stock setpoint of Avalon's new 16nm; I think it's spec'd down to about 0.18J/GH chip-level and I've seen an S7 get 0.22J/GH wall. It ain't easy but it's doable.

I couldn't even get Bitmain to sell me more BM1384 last fall. They straight-up told me no with BM1385, and the 87 they didn't even publish a datasheet. I don't think they care at all.


Offering $50 per chip is the same as just saying no, and anyone with half a mind would figure that out.


Oh hey also, vh is onboard with the BM1384 project so that's good. It's probably gonna take some packet sniffing and analysis to figure out exactly what we need to do to talk to multiple chips since S5/BM1384 protocol documentation is basically nonexistent, but I'm already working on a testing setup for that. It's fortunate I forgot to include my first BM1384 testing PCBs in the prototyping stuff auction a few weeks ago because now I'm using them again.

So, with vh in the game working on the code, I'm okay putting more resources into the hardware end of the project. Already got a layout for the 2pac, and I spent a couple hours today working on 15pac layout. I pretty much know where everything is going to go, but for that many chips there's a lot of connections and a lot of inter-node level shifters and bypass caps and stuff to worry about so it might be a while.

And hopefully before long we hear good news from Bitfury, and then I'll be super busy forever doubleteaming manufacture of 2pac and 15pac while doing dev for Bitfury boards. But that's the good kind of busy.

BM1385 is the S7 chip and is 28nm; BM1387 is the S9 chip and is 16nm.