If Innosilicon would get rid of the bloody high MOQ on their miners, I'd LOVE to start buying A4 units.

Good bit larger than a shoebox, looking at the pics - more like a double shoebox, and not a lot smaller than some "short" 4u cases.


ETH dev team called ETH "ASIC resistant" not "ASIC proof" - there's a difference, and if they get POS rolled out by the end of the year forking due to this miner would be a waste of time.


There is ONE video about a "F3" miner, but it's very uninformative and no clue what algorithm it's supposed to be for - the RUMORS were "ethash" but I'm starting to doubt that now.

Instant Buy button was ACTIVE a few minutes ago when I checked.

It does NOT appear to be sold out - but it's possible I checked right after someone canceled or "failed to pay in time" on an order.

It's easier to look at their hashrate chart, but the diff chart will work too.
Note that except for one "single-day" spike on April 26 that was probably LUCK driven (might have been folks on auto-switch miners bouncing out of ETC or some such though), the Ethereum Total Hashrate (and difficulty) has been slowly DROPPING since April 16.

Yes, there was a big surge for several months before that - but the surge is OVER unless Ethereum price starts rising.

Bitmain typical batch size is only around 3000 for most of their miners though.
3000 isn't going to even make a NOTICEABLE dent in the recent "slow drop" of Ethereum network hashrate, especially when they don't arrive for over 2 months.

Also, they are NOT sold out on the E3, the "one click buy" button is still active.

Or the F3 isn't an ethash miner - perhaps it's for some other algorithm?

I'm starting to wonder if the rumored "F3" is NOT an ETH miner.
Nist5 or Lyra2RE2 perhaps?

Hashrate from that video is way too high for it to be an equhash (ZEC/ZEN and such) miner.

Turns out the Bitmain E3 (NOT the F3 as reported) is not exactly a big GPU mining killer.

180 Mhash
800 watts

About the the SAME performance as a well-tuned 6 card RX 580/480 based rig, and slightly INFERIOR to a well-tuned 6-card GTX 1070 based rig.

On the other hand, at $800 they WILL sell these things probably as fast as they can make them, for a while.

First batch isn't shipping 'till mid-July though - achieving 100% ROI is going to be a bit iffy even if POS gets pushed back a couple more times.

http://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020180403174908564M8dMJKtz06B7

Note that Bitmain would have to sell well over ONE MILLION of these units to double the current ETH Network Hashrate (at current numbers right around 1.75 million, then add in a few hundred thousand more to cover ETC and the other forked ethash coins).
It took them almost 2 YEARS to achieve close to One Million sales on the S9, and the S9 is higher performance and efficiency than ANYTHING ELSE currently shipping.


Don't bother forking the algorithm on ETH for THESE miners, it's not worth the time and trouble.

And it turns out that the F3 shown in that video is apparently NOT an ETH ASIC miner.

Bitmain released their E3 today for preorders - delivery NOT 'TILL MID JULY (indicating that they do NOT have many units on hand).

180 Mhash
800 watts

(they CLAIM these are minimums, but they'd have to do a TON better to change the below commentary).


About the same hashate and same power draw as a well-tuned 6-card  RX 480/580 "BIOS modded for memory straps" rig.
Slightly LESS hashrate and slightly MORE power draw than a well-tuned 6-card GTX 1070 rig.
NOT exactly a GPU mining killer.

Note that they would have to sell well over ONE MILLION of these units to achieve 50% of the current ETH network hashrate.
For perspective, current Bitcoin network hashrate equates out pretty closely to 2 Million S9 units (but PART of that hashware is LW.COM internal-usage miners, some is Avalon 721/741 units, some is EBang miners, et cetera - Bitmain PROBABLY has sold a total of ONE MILLION S9 units but it took them almost 2 YEARS to manage that despite having THE best performance miner on the market).

The E3 is NOT a GPU mining killer - in fact, I doubt it's going to make much more than a SMALL DENT in ethash mining profitability before ETH goes Proof of Stake and the REAL shakeout happens.

On the positive side, they DID get the price at $800 to a reasonable level, and probably WILL sell as many of these units as they choose to make since that's a LOT cheaper than building a GPU rig that can match the performance.

Nonono, the REAL Easter Bunny is here!

Bitmain E3 isn't shipping 'till Mid-July - and is about the SAME specs (180 Mhash at 800 watts) as a well-tuned 6-card AMD RX 480/580 rig, and INFERIOR in performance to a well-tuned Nvidia GTX 1070 6-card rig (186+ Mhash at 700-750 watts).

Only thing it has going for it is the LOW PRICE.

Apparently the rumours about a "F3" unit were incorrect, as was that one published video - or the "F3" isn't an ETH mining unit.

Interesting, as the actual "put code in the mclk and sclk" type stuff in sysfs does NOT actually change the clocks when I tried it on my 4 x R9 290 rig or my mixed R9 280x/HD7850/HD7750 rig.

Did you check /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_pm_info to see if the clocks actually CHANGED? (change the 0 for the specific card being checked of course).


Might also be a "R9 3xx" vs "R9 2xx" difference, or a GCN 3 vs older GCN versions difference, if it DOES actually work - I only have R9 290/280x + HD 7870/7850/7750 cards to test on while GCN 3 wasn't introduced 'till the R9 285 (Tonga) card.

ETH PRICE jumped more in the 3Q/4Q timeframe in absolute terms than in the 2Q (2Q was a much higher PERCENTAGE increase).
Also, availability of GPUs to mine it WITH became a major issue for a while in 2Q - don't you remember AMD high-end Polaris cards selling for more than Nvidia 1070 and even some Nvidia 1080 cards for a month or so?
It takes TIME to aquire parts and build rigs, as well as a chunk of cash - pretty much across the board ALL altcoins ran into that issue.
Then the second bit spike hit in early January, fueling ANOTHER explosion of hashrate for a while, 'till coin prices started dropping seriously.

110 THash is less than 4 million GPUs (presuming RX 470/480/570/580 or GTX 1070) - given AMD and Nvidia extreme shortages that started right after Christmas and did NOT get better 'till a couple weeks ago, there is no need to blame a large number of ASIC for the jump - GPUs can EASILY account for it.



THE KILLER to your theory - Bitmain announced their E3 ASIC unit TODAY but it doesn't ship 'till mid-July indicating THEY DON'T HAVE MANY OF THEM ON HAND.
It turns out to be a little LESS EFFICIENT AND LOWER HASHRATE than a well-tuned Nvidia 1070 6-card rig and about the SAME hashrate and efficiency as a VERY well tuned AMD RX 480/580 6-card rig.
The E3 is NOT a GPU mining killer - Bitmain would have to sell over ONE MILLION of them to achieve 50% of current ETH total network hashrate, but there's no way they can get enough CHIPS to manage that in a significantly short timeframe.

For perspective, it has taken them almost 2 *YEARS* to sell ballpark ONE MILLION of the S9 units (there is some question as to the actual number due to competition from the Avalon 721/741, the unknown number of miners BW.COM uses in it's internal farm, the number of eBang miners sold or used internally, but *probably* a majority of the Bitcoin total network hashrate is from S9 units) - this is despite the S9 being the unquestionable "most efficient miner for SHA256 made" (a title it STILL holds at this time given reported Halong ACTUAL performance).

I seriously doubt the E3 will manage to achieve 50% of all ETH mining hashrate before ETH goes POS.

There's a REASON Bitmain is pricing it so cheap - it won't SELL if it wasn't cheap.


ETH over the last 2 weeks or so has been flat (give or take luck varience) on total network hashrate - if folks are still building new rigs, they're being matched by folks shutting down rigs or moving them to other stuff.


I can believe Bitmain had "engineering test" units online as early as December 2017 - but I do NOT believe they had "production" units online anywhere near that early, or in significant numbers before VERY recently.

Newer Claymore versions are compiled against a GCC library that doesn't normally exist on Ubuntu 14.x and can be a major pain to GET installed (Canonical doesn't support it directly, you have to get "fancy" with Debian package management or install source and compile it).
If you are using older cards with the fglrx driver, you have to stick with 14.04.03 (or 14.04.04/05 IF you downgrade the Xserver to the version 14.04.03 used) due to incompatability with fglrx.

16.04 and later you HAVE to use the AMDGPU driver stack, which has limited support for older cards at all and doesn't "officially" support power limit control or undervolting AT ALL even on Polaris/Vega cards (and forget about clock control on R9 series cards as it DOES NOT WORK).

Claymore needs to FIX his "recommended drivers" as the 15.12 Catalyst drivers aren't supported any more under LINUX, never did work with Polaris cards (too outdated).
I also fail to understand why he recommends 16.12 at ALL as that version DID NOT SUPPORT BIOS MODDED CARDS AT ALL (16.9.2 would be a MUCH better option for Windows 7, blockchain or very recent versions for Windows 10).

The problem with those wattage claims is that AMD Polaris cards only report the power used by the GPU itself, NOT the total power used by the card.
This is a HARDWARE limitation issue that no software can work around at this point.

Nvidia cards on the other hand DO report total card power (except for the bugged GTX 1050/1050 ti ones), so tools like Nvidia-SMI and such tend to give fairly accurate information.

NEWEGG pricing (not the third-party sellers there) was more like $400-$450 for most RX 470/480/570/580 at the "2-3 months ago" peak - so they have dropped some but not as much as you claim (lowest NEW listing the last 2-3 days at $339).
They DID get into the $550+ range briefly a YEAR ago on internal pricing.

Nvidia availability has gotten a TON better the last 2 weeks, though mostly MSI and Gigabyte models, and the price has dropped some - I think most of the price premium there at this point is due to "RAM shortage gouge pricing".


As long as coin prices don't jump again, GPU price should keep sliding slowly while availability gets better.

I suspect it might be an actual ASIC, due to the price - but as it doesn't even match my PREDICTED performance or that one video posted (that was supposed to be for a "F3 model" anyway) it's certainly not a GPU killer.

A well tuned 6 card GTX 1070 rig will pull 186+ Mhash at about 700 watts (my 5 card rigs only manage 156 at 700 but that's with a HIGH power usage CPU mining Monero at the same time).

The PRICE however does make it attractive, if enough of the ethash coins don't fork soon and you have low enough power cost and the coin pricing doesn't keep dropping (we DID have a small rebound the last couple days).


It would take over a MILLION of these units being sold to manage 50% of ETH total network hashrate (then a couple hundred thousand MORE for the other ethash spinoff coins like ETC) - this is barely even going to DENT GPU mining profitabilty at the typical number of units Bitmain sells in a batch.


The question at this point becomes "is there something better in the Bitmain labs that they haven't released yet, how much better IF so, and when and what price will THAT get released at".

Given the relatively LOW performance of the E3, even if Bitmain WAS mining on a lot of them (unlikely) before they announced them, they had little or no impact on ETH profitability.
They're WORSE efficiency than a well-tuned 6-card GTX 1070 rig, about the same vs a 6-card RX 470/480/570/580 rig - the only reason they might make SOME dent into GPU mining is the low price Bitmain set them at and that is going to be a SMALL dent unless Bitmain literally sells SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND of these particular ASIC units.

1 MILLION of these units sold wouldn't achieve 50% of ETH total network hashrate - and even Bitmain would need a very long time to build and sell a million of these.


The sky not only is not falling, it's barely even a light drizzle....

Efficiency is very close but NO BETTER than a well-optimised Nvida GTX 1070 based 6 card rig, and a HAIR better than a 6-card RX 480/580 8GB based rig.

The ONLY thing this has going for it is PRICE (which IS killer for the hashrate).

It's interesting that it doesn't match up to the "claimed" specs for the "claimed F3" though or even close - this thing doesn't even match my PREDICTED stats from the current Philipma1957 thread....

The price point however makes sense - it's ballpark 1/3'd the price of a comparable GPU-based mining rig (even with no power supply included).



MegaBigPower on that "ASIC development" list shouldn't be there - they were a BitFury partner not an independent developer.
"Avalon Project" - shouldn't that be listed under Caanan instead?

I've never worried about "rankings", the original "rank" was all about just being active on the forum for quite a while and is largely meaningless.

I don't think I even noticed the "merit" stuff for a couple weeks to a month after it showed up.