I actually wasn't directing my comments specifically at you Adam, but I guess they must have struck a nerve somewhere, eh?

Speculation is a very dangerous game to play. I am pretty sure that Mr. Corem and his development team have much better things to do than discuss their company plans with a bunch of people who clearly have way too much time on their hands.

The Spondoolies team have earned their spurs the hard way by having to go to work every day and spending years developing their skills and abilities. They produced by far the best and most professional equipment ever seen in mining and I don't believe for one minute that they have been sitting on their hands for the past year, what they have been doing is none of your business unless they want you to know it.

So why not ty to devote your time to something a little more useful, perhaps like getting a real job and doing some useful work? Maybe even study for a proper engineering qualification? It's hard work but well worth it in the end - you don't have to constantly consult Wikipedia and sift through the deluge of misinformation on the web.

I thnk that Bitfury are very unlikely to sell these containers, on their webpage blurb they mention the phrase 'maintained by Bitfury' which to my mind suggest a leasing agreement. Look at it this way, if they rent oiut the equipment then they get the best of both worlds - they can get someone to essentially fund it, charge them monthly maintenance fees then take it back at the end of the lease period and upgrade it with new chips, also throwing in terms that if Btc rises in price then then get a cut of the extra profit (but not a cut in rental if it falls).

Imagine this scenario:

Btc = $400, Network hashrate is at 1500PH, block reward has halved to 12.5Btc.

1 PH earns approx US$ 11.7k per month after electricity cost of 3 US cents per kWh, for 16PH it's $187k

Network hashrate rises linearly by 100 PH per month, over a year the 16 PH container will earn a total
of roughly $1.56 million, again after electricity costs.

I estimate that Bitfury can build this containerised system for about $900 k, including 11kV input capability. Of that amount around $550k will be 160,000 chips on plug in modules, so the actual infrastructure costs about $350k. If they build the container with borrowed money at, say 8% then after a year then will have paid for the container and have around $590k in the bank.


Is it better to keep the container and mine with it themselves or charge a third party a rental fee?

From the investors perspective they might pay anything up to $1.35 million in the hope of making 15% on their money, where else could they enjoy short term potential profit at this rate? At $1.35M Bitfury makes a $450k profit on the deal less their 'maintenance' costs - if charged, but they will be using someone else's money to build the container in the first place and that might be a very inportant factor in their decision - more containers built means lower parts costs AND deters competitors. They also still have the container at the end of the years contract. The investors could sell their hashing power onto others and so increase their effective margins without using so much (if any) of their own money.

Naturally, all of this is highly speculative and depends on many factors but I though it was worth taking a stab at how things might shape up.

Any other theories / conjectures? All comments welcome

 

Unless it's a really bad design this chip should cost them about $3 to make (packaged). That's assuming 5 million chip quantities or 500 PH. What will they sell it for? Much more than this, that's for sure but I'd guess they want to give buyers a hope that they can pay back their costs in about 6-9 months, so probably around $8 for volume buyers, $10.50 for the plebs.

I get fed up saying this but people should read a lot more before shooting their mouths off. No one has laid a chip out by hand since the late 1970's - probably about the time your parents were born. This statement was just another piece of bullshit from Bitfury trying to make their chip sound 'special' in some way.

If you want some real, actual informed data about what full custom actually entails then I'm happy to recommend some very good books to you to help reduce your level of ignorance, you clearly don't really understand what full custom means or entails or what good engineers can do with it.

I'll bet that Bitmain make a lot of money on their S7's and could probably reduce it's price to sub $600 and still make a profit, so they have no real need in the near future to make a new chip (although I'm sure they will). They'll continue to make money on their 28nm cash cow for some time. They might even conjure up a containerised system of their own......

Dogie, you're great with these short sentences which subtly suggest inside knowledge, but nless you have access to Bitfurys detailed management accounts then you have no idea what's actually going on, have you?. Yes, they have 16% of the network capacity which should make them about $6m a month net of power costs at BTC=$400, but they have a lot of mouths to feed - just look at the number of executive officers - 12 of them (!) plus another 5 board members and good knows how many hangers on not to mention the actual workers. Then they have to finance development and running costs and presumably they have raised $60M + by making some very challenging promises to their backers.

Why do you think they are selling their Golden Geese?  

Like everything that Bitfury announces you have to read very carefully, I refer to: "We understand it will be nearly impossible for any older technology to compete .......". The 'nearly' is the giveaway, despite their strange announcement about 'every transistor on the new chip being laid out by hand' they know that ultimately their solution, for one reason or another, has not worked exactly to plan and that a good full custom 28nm design can beat the crap out of it. Such solutions exist.

Sometimes silence is the best strategy, don't demean your competition or their engineers, by all means promote your products but don't try to make out they are something that they're not. I'm pretty sure that Bitmain aren't losing any sleep over this chip and the mere fact that Bitfury are promoting sales so strangely tends to suggest:

1. They are losing a lot of money or are  under pressure from their investors to make more and need to
    make it up from the suckers, sorry, customers who are desperate to get their paws on the wonder chip

2. They are worried that Bitmain have got a very cost effective solution which will ultimately come to
    dominate the network before they can get any real advantage from 16nm. I'm guessing that as well as
    mining Bitmain make very healthy margins from their S7's

Other suggestions are most welcome.

Just a couple of points:

12PH @ 1.5 MW = 0.125 J/(gh/sec)
16PH @ 2.0MW  = 0.125 J/(gh/sec)

Yes, you get power supply losses, but not 25%. I'm referring to the famous 0.1 J/gh figure.

Bitfury are also vague on the 'plug and play' angle, does this thing take 440 V 3 phase or 11kV? If it's the latter I would be surprised although they mention 'transformers' so maybe it does have about 10 tonnes of power transformer, circuit breakers, pf caps and other bits inside.

Why they are publishing and pushing this stuff is anyones guess, but you can bet your bottom dollar (or bitcoin) that they will only sell this if they can make enough profit on it to offset losses they would make from creating another competitor. Maybe they just want to dominate the market in asics by decentralising through leasing equipment to competitors.

See anything wrong with this picture?

And you should listen to this guy, he has actually product-engineered a system using a proprietary chip. Despite his modesty that's just as hard a task as designing the silicon!

Firstly, let me say that I very much admire your goal of wanting to make a new chip, I sincerely hope you are successful.

The main obstacle to you succeeding is finance - to build a 16nm chip will mean an NRE of around $5 - 7 Million dollars, depending on which route you choose, and that's a huge amount of money to get hold of. Having said that, a complete bunch of chancers called KNC raised a lot more than that for their first offering, so you never know. You've also got the cost of renting design tools and all the expenses that go with running a company. You might be able to get a slot on a 16nm MPW run, but you'll still be looking at over $1m if you want to have any chance of getting a prototype.

The best advice I can give you is to ignore most of what you read on this forum, it's full of 'experts' (who are anything but) who are only interested in given their opinion on all things silicon design wise. Needless to say, virtually none of them have actually designed  anything electronic of any complexity let alone a chip, so be careful what advice you take. The real experts, and there are a handful, will give you useful and practical advice rather then repeat what they've read on Wikipedia.

If your design guy is any good he will quickly figure out how simple SHA256 is, it's really just full adders and flip flops with some very simple logic thrown in and if he looks to academic articles he'll get a lot more ideas than he'll ever find on this forum.

Good luck!

The only meaningful metric is J/(GH/sec), if you don't have a time factor then the figure may be correct but it may take the age of the universe to make a single calculation. Running a chip in it's 'sweet spot' is totally misleading, the sweet spot may be at 0.33V, 50 Mhz for a chip designed to run at 0.66V, 1.2Ghz where it's energy efficiency is much lower.

It matters to people who are thinking of buying new kit, and from comments I've seen there are quite a few folks who have decided to wait for Bitfury's 'better' offerings rather than buying Bitmains product on the grounds the Bitfury product will be more efficient.

By the looks of things it won't and their released information is misleading. I though that one of the purposes of this forum is to share information and flag up data that simply isn't true?

They do not  have a cost effective solution that runs at 0.06 J/(GH/sec), their chip is designed to run at 192 GH/sec, not the 40GH/sec quoted at the 0.06 figure. Sure, you could use 5 x 40GH/sec chips running at 0.06 to get to 192, but then you use nearly 5 times the amount of energy! (and 5 times the chip, board and component cost).

In short, you can buy Bitmains product today and get just as cost efficient a product as Bitfury's 16nm offering.

All that NRE and development money for nothing.

Firstly, congratulations to Bitfury on getting their chip working. Considering the number of asic mining chips that have failed to deliver in one way or another, it's always good to see a new one coming along.

However, I think they are being somewhat 'economical with the truth' in terms of the actual performance of the device, and that makes me a little suspicious of what they say. I'm especially wary of their power consumption figures, or should I say lack of said. Yes, they are given a headline figure of 0.06 J/GH, which is a meaningless metric as it should be J/(GH/sec) for any meaningful comparison, but then they claim 40Gh/sec at the same figure. Still no mention of clock speed, but we'll leave that just now.

Many month ago Guy Corem of Spondoolies posted that sub 0.1 J/(GH/sec) was possible in 28nm with 'extreme' design  and he is absolutely right, in fact Bitfury get their low power consumption with a very low voltage and presumably a very low clock speed.

This is hardly breaking edge design, especially in 16nm.

Bitfury go on to say the device can operate up to 192GH/sec but fail to mention the power consumption (or clock) at this speed. Why? If this device is as energy efficient as they say them surely it should be at least sub 0.1 J/(Gh/sec) to compare with what Bitmain can achieve in 28nm? Stepping own two process nodes (28 to 20 to 14/16) should result in energy saving of at least 50% so why hide it unless the actual figure is higher than expected? They also convenient ignore to specify the J/(GH/sec) at 55 Gh/sec, mentioning only 'convergence to a plateau' (from 40 Gh/sec) whatever the hell that means.

Then there is the matter of the die size. Again no mention of this in Bitfury's press release, but one of Guy's extreme design techniques involves using a lot of silicon area, so I'm hazarding a guess that this little beast is probably a good deal larger than one might expect. I'm taking a guess that the chip is running at around 1Ghz when producing 192 GH/sec in which case a cell based design would come out at around 25 square millimetres, 5mm on a side. I'd love to know how this one compares, naturally a bigger clock speed means a smaller die.

I don't have any Bitfury products or interest in their company save what they choose to print, so I have no axe of any kind to grind with them. They can write what they like, but please don't try to mislead or misinform people, I know they are not in the consumer market any more but take a leaf out of Spondoolies book and give people comprehensive REAL figures of what your devices can achieve in practice rather than carefully chosen 'sweet spots', especially if you are planning to ask them to part with money. That's what the real engineers do.

So why not say January 2016 instead of the wooliness of 'winter' 2016? Is it taped out yet or are they waiting on preorders to fund the NRE?

I'm surprised no one has picked this up - 

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bw-to-launch-nm-chip-and-miner-for-general-population-1445278227

BM plan to make a 14nm chip, all the usual nonsense and weasel words including this from the journalist:

"The quiet, behind-the-scenes juggernaut in bitcoin mining, Bi Wang (BW), is announcing the release of its 14nm chip that the company believes is at the cutting edge of bitcoin mining equipment"

Oh yeah? I believe it isn't so who is right?

This device isn't due until Q4 next year, and they will only sell their miners in batches of 333 pieces, 3TH each at $250 or $0.08 per GH. By the time they arrive the hash rate will likely be over 900 petahashes so I'd love to see their financial projections for this project. For the buyer its not a great deal even with Btc at $300 they are likely to make about $1.8 a day, less electricity costs (about 50 cents a day even at $0.05 per kWh) and you can bet that the hashrate will only go higher once all their pre orders get dumped on the network.

So if you fancy financing their chip and future profit, why not get your (virtual) wallets out?

1 Petahash in a container?

What on earth would make anyone think that this is exceptional, it's probably two generations out of date?

In case of any doubt about 21's intentions, they, and their investors couldn't care less about whether or not this development boards sells 1 or a million units, the end game is to generate enough public interest for an IPO which will probably be priced at about $25 + billion (at least to the sheep that will doubtlessly buy shares in it).

They can claim they have sold 100,000 boards to developers. Who will know? They'll get plenty of hangers-on to publicly declare their support for the project and the idea of micropayments for digital services.

Once they get their hands on a couple of billion.....you can imagine what they might do.

It's baffling why you don't see the significance of GH/mm2 in the context of this discussion. Your company surely understands the advantages of running chips at low voltage and if you have a hashing engine running at the minimum energy point then it's possible to get some truly amazing efficiency. Trouble is, you then need multiple engines to get any speed.

That's why Guy's GH/mm2 metric is significant. You might also like to read this excellent paper by Tran and Baas that demonstrates very clearly the concept of minimum energy points although I'm guessing it's probably old news to you. Yes, I know it's for a 32 bit adder but the principle is still valid for SHA256 (which in any case uses 32 bit adders in the main pipeline and word generator)

http://web.ece.ucdavis.edu/~anhttran/files/papers/atran_icce10_adder.pdf


As for engineering porn, what you are currently offering isn't porn, it's more like burlesque where it' all tease. I don't think anyone believes the figures you released other than a crude attempt to worry your competitors and maybe dissuade them from building more capacity. Just like the statement one of your engineers made about everyone else being 18 months behind you, it's insulting their intelligence and
demeaning their abilities.

Personally, I would 100 times more trust what previous Intel engineers say can be done than a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs - unless the latter can actually prove how big their balls are.  

Empirically derived? What on earth does that mean in the real world of engineering?

If you were an engineer at CERN working with subatomic particles with ultra short lifetimes I might understand using this expression, but in our macro world we have voltmeters, ammeters and oscilloscopes that negate the need for 'derivation'.

Are you trying to say that that put some figures into a simulator and uses some trial and error to get the result you want? Naturally, you are not answerable to anyone on this forum or indeed any paying customers, so whatever you claim doesn't need to be defended in any way.

Bank on $500,000 - 700,000 per Petahash and you won't be too far out.

That assumes you can find a company willing to sell you the mining equipment at a reasonable cost and don't forget about physical and internet security systems.