Yohan,
I think Cairnsmore1 was a great product for the FPGA era and respect your ability with boards, etc.
At the end of the day you have some type of semiconductor chip to perform SHA2 hashing. This chip is either a standard FPGA, structured ASIC, eASIC, cell based ASIC, full custom ASIC, or something else.
What type of chip is by far the #1 consideration factor in determining the likely success and longevity of a project. I don't see how people could possibly evaluate the project's potential without this information.
For example: Do you have a wafer piggy back ASIC run available to produce 50 custom ASIC chips at 65nm, but not enough to sell? If so, yes I would be very interested in this project. Are you putting together boards with 100 FPGAs on them and making massive FPGA arrays? If so, no I am not interested.
@Rocks. Enterpoint is surpassing lack of disclosure levels that we've seen so far with the likes of BFL. They aren't offering any technical details. Yes, a technical premise on which to judge Enterpoint's Goliath longevity would make for a smarter investment decision. Yohan has basically said no. What's even more interesting is how they plan to protect investment in the face of favorable competing technologies. The OP mentions some sort of compensation based on one's investment duration if Enterpoint's Goliath operation becomes less competitive. That kind of scheme shows they don't have a plan for that. |
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Re: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=130386.msg1395048#msg1395048So, I interpret the announcement from Yohan at Enterpoint to mean that they intend to self mine bitcoin. They are pinging the community's possible interest in investing in to their operation. Of course, once they bring on investors it would no longer be a purely private self mining operation. Enterpoint claims to have highly sensitive proprietary technology, competitive with ASIC (but not ASIC), that completely precludes the option of selling boards to consumers. This would be to avoid any reverse engineering risk. It's unclear how large of an operation Enterpoint would have by self-mining without any outside investment. Enterpoint states they would grow their public self-mining operation to meet outside investment levels. How do you feel about this? Do you believe companies, e.g. ASICMiner, Enterpoint, pose any kind of threat by self mining? What is Enterpoint's motivation to seek out 'loan note' or offer equity shares to the community? With Enterpoint possibly going public with the mining operation who holds the most risk? What is Enterpoint's margin in good times and in cases where competing technologies become favorable. Is community investment a hedge? |
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Re: We wont release tech details, but feel free to speculate.
Achieving competitive hash rates with FPGA seems to be so unlikely that I can imagine the worst kind of speculation. Not to mention how an assumed FPGA based system would compete with future ASIC die shrinks from competitors.
A complete lack of technical details doesn't inspire confidence. What you are proposing should be believable. Especially since you are asking for equity funds or a loan.
At this stage we are not asking people to believe us. You can believe or not we don't actually care at this stage whether you believe. As yet we are not even asking for money merely polling to people to find out if whether our favoured selling mechanisms would be viable. But speaking of blind faith look at the people that sunk huge amounts of money in the existing ???ASIC manfacturers without even test die being available and arguable track record in the ASIC field. Before we ask for money you will be able to see the inital small system results in the network hash rate. It will be big enough to be noticed. We think we can build so much hashing power that it would make the market unstable and we plan to control the hashing power release to avoid creating a problem. The questions should be more of how much investment gets me what hash rate? and maybe when can pay my money and have my share allocation? As to the technology it's more valuable to us in other markets so handing out our ideas and knowledge in any shape or form isn't a flyer. That includes even giving a hint of what we are doing. What I can say is that it is a culmination of work we have done even before we got into Bitcoin and it is very innovative. We just took the last 8 months to take these ideas forward to being a very serious Bitcoin mining contender. Yohan So, if you are going to suggest more valid questions (not my opinion, but I digress) why don't you answer them rather than being rhetorical? edit Regarding blind faith. It's plain to see at this point many customers are not happy with purchases on faith to be delayed many months. I think less of making purchase decisions without data or without accurate data would be a positive change. As for me. Pics or it didn't happen. |
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Re: We wont release tech details, but feel free to speculate.
Achieving competitive hash rates with FPGA seems to be so unlikely that I can imagine the worst kind of speculation. Not to mention how an assumed FPGA based system would compete with future ASIC die shrinks from competitors.
A complete lack of technical details doesn't inspire confidence. What you are proposing should be believable. Especially since you are asking for equity funds or a loan.
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This has been tried for a while now, but it has its own pitfalls.
I don't think (from my own research) that anyone has gone as far with this idea as I have (apart from perhaps Charles Symonyi's "Intentional Software" platform ) but I will welcome criticism when I launch the project (the entire website will have 0% manually written source). Looking forward to it. Should be interesting. |
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I have found that during the recent pool outages that cgminer is not switching to backup pools. Bitminter is marked dead, then alive, but no work issued.
Any ideas before I raise this in the cgminer thread?
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@Aido
I tried that 'interesting bash command.' It worked once, but then there were problems. What gives?
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If you guys at Avalon are confident of your process, tech and timeline why wouldn't you open up more capacity to accept orders from disenchanted customers of competitors?
Let me explain to you what our timeline actually looks like, so you may get a better picture. We plan to ship at Jan 14th, 2013. Hopefully finish shipping all 300 before Chinese New Year holiday. To foresee some potential problems, we originally announced we will finish shipping all 300 units before End of February 2013 for exactly this reason. Therefore, due to this holiday, we will have a large delay between when the second shipment can start, which is estimated at Feb 24th currently. It is because we are so confident we will not be taking your money so early and not ship any goods, especially it is some delay that is beyond our control. Ok, fair enough. |
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If you guys at Avalon are confident of your process, tech and timeline why wouldn't you open up more capacity to accept orders from disenchanted customers of competitors?
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pool dropped out for a couple of minutes.
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Thank for sharing the info.
However you did not black out the top pixel line of the price digits, so we can still make them out by comparing them with other non-obscured digits in the document:
Pilot / Engineering Wafer Lot Price = either $1x,xxx.xx or $4x,xxx.xx
Production Wafer Unit Price = $4,xxx.xx
Mask Set Price = $2xx,xxx
It is probably possible to make out some of the unknown 'x' digits by counting the spacing between the pixels, but I was too lazy to do it. The most significantly digit is the most important one anyway.
This price quote is a proof to people who don't believe that ASICs are cheap to manufacture, after NRE costs are recovered. A 12-inch wafer costs $4k for Avalon. They will likely make about a thousand chips per wafer assuming a 50 mm˛ die. Which means each chip technically costs about $4. There is going to be ten chips or so per Avalon device, so $40 of ASIC chips in a device that is sold $1300. That's a profit margin of $1260! (I am simplying here, there are other minor costs: chip packaging, other components, PCB, etc, maybe $100-$200 maximum). Of course this insane profit margin is only valid once NRE costs ($200k+) are recovered. But some/all ASIC vendors will eventually recover them... so expect ASIC prices to eventually drop massively.
Actually this is very wrong, at this point in time, when we initially made the 300 order limitation, we were right at our break even point, and currently due to fees and other some problems, we are in fact in the red. Also while we can not reveal our chip numbers per unit, but it is much greater than 10 chips. Everyone is simply under the impression that 7GH/s chips are the "norm" due to what I believe to be false advertisement by the competition.If you can get me those other components you mentioned like PCB, PSU and other stuff for 100-200 dollars maximum, maybe we should hire you to manage our component purchasing! a single good PSU is near $100... With the quality of disclosure coming from Avalon I'm starting to believe this to be true. And I'm getting pissed. |
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Inflation based theft. It doth suck.
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My rigs are powered by hash oil.
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I LIKE TURTLES
Do you like cheese? |
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Perhaps we need to assign some kind of "confirmed" status to actual company representatives so that users can easily distinguish between service provider staff and others who may use the prefix because they're fanbois or trolls.
But what if they are all of the above (staff, fanboy, troll) - like BFL_Josh? Confirmed Turd Sandwich good tag. |
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Grr, I really do short at all the wrong times.
IMO, it will drop quickly.
No one believes you High is "1337" right now, so maybe it's up, UP...forever. |
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Grr, I really do short at all the wrong times.
IMO, it will drop quickly.
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