I would suggest that you don't purchase all nine rigs immediately, but start with, say, three and find out whether the A/C can actually get rid of the heat of 3 rigs nicely, leaving the room at 72 or 74 maybe even 78 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because chances are, the A/C (and/or the air duct system) is not designed to get rid of 10,000 W - maybe it is only designed  for two or three humans at 250W each and a single desktop PC at 250W.

I had an office in Palo Alto with 8 rigs drawing a total of 4,000 W and the only way I could avoid thermal meltdown was opening the window and putting the rigs on the windowsill, their rear facing outwards. Eventually they kicked me out for using excessive electricity ("breach of contract").

Currently I have an office in Santa Clara with 3 rigs drawing 2,000 W, but the window cannot be opened and thus I cannot turn on more rigs. Even so, it gets hot like in a sauna and when I spend any extended period of time there, I have to take off my shirt and sit there in my undershirt...

Such a "solution" is just a waste of time, as the inductance of the supply wires (core voltage, I/O voltage and GND) would be way too high and the FPGA would not operate reliably at any decent clock, if at all.

Consider a FPGA implementation of the Bitcoin mining algorithm (double SHA-256). There are 128 rounds of 256 bits each, i.e. 32768 flip-flops, all of which switch at the same time. All these flip-flops switching at the same time causes a momentary spike in power draw. Let´s say, for the sake of argument, from about 1 Amp when no flip-flops are switching to, say, a momentary power draw of 25 Amps (est.). If there is any inductance at all in the supply wires, the momentary power draw of 25 Amps will cause the internal core voltage to sag below the minimum acceptable core voltage, and the ground level that the FPGA sees to rise.

Below minimum core voltage, correct operation of the FPGA is no longer guaranteed, as the contents of flip-flops and even the contents of the configuration registers may be lost or corrupted.

julz, I can only answer for myself, but for me the potential for profit is nice, but it is not the only motivation for investing in 12 BFL singles, all of them undelivered, and one LargeCoin box, undelivered as well. An equally strong motivation for me is the prospect of a portable, anonymous and potentially even unaccountable and untraceable income stream. Consider, for instance, what would happen if a married couple with 3 kids, the guy a software engineer and the woman a housewife, were to divorce in the People's Republic of California. I tell you what would happen: The guy would be left with an income similar to what a single guy who flips burgers at McDonalds makes, and the ex-wife would be riding the gravy train at about 2.5 times that amount. The guy would be one medical issue, one car accident, one layoff away from living on the streets. Literally. A significant percentage of the homeless population in California are divorced guys who had their wages garnished and thus could not afford the rent anymore.

No. I'm in Europe right now and would actually prefer to wire the deposit from Europe, and I told them that, but they replied by email that they need more time to set up everything.

As I was the first one to fill out the document they sent to everyone who expressed interest in buying a rig (the document was mostly about confirming name & address), they sent me a gift via Amazon.com (I think it is a Nerf gun - I'll give it to my son, whose 9th birthday is coming up).

>and even provide the software for free

I've not seen that recently.
The multi-project wafer houses that I have looked at recently do not provide the tool chain and just run your wafer, or provide only PART of the tool chain (the back end, i.e. physical part).

For instance, in the flowchart on their site, eAsic specifically refers to the Synopsys design compiler being required (and no, they will not provide it for free, dream on).

If you have seen that somewhere, please point me to it.

20 years ago, different story. I helped someone with a standard cell ASIC (on 2um technology or whatever it was back then) at a standard cell house in Munich. The design software ran on Sun workstations and you would sit onsite and enter your design. I don't recall the name of the company but it was something like E2S or E2 or something.

WHEN in Jan?
1st?
31st?

They just sent me an email that SIGNIFICANTLY MORE than 25 people have ordered one at $15,000 each, and they will honor all these [legally probably non-binding] commitments. So, you can give it a shot and try to order one on their order website. If it still says $15,000, chances are, you'll be in.

Oh, they are probably all busy cutting big holes in the bottom of the enclosures and mounting the 2nd fan.

After we got married, I changed my primary checking account into a joint account, but she didn't change her primary checking account into a joint account, so I was like: "Wow. O.K. Welcome to California Feminism."

Recently, I closed the joint account and instead I just give her a monthly allowance of $1,400 for food, clothes and gasoline, and of course I pay all the bills such as mortgage, utilities, property tax, car insurance, fire insurance, credit cards, etc. etc.

Lucky you - my wife would most certainly play the blame game and thus I keep her totally in the dark about the three GPU mining rigs, the ZTEX FPGA miner, the twelve singles I have ordered (but not received yet) and the C200 which I have tried to order (but have no order confirmation for, yet). I'm mining in my rented business office, which she also does not know about...

With all due respect, I think it was YOU who said that their first batch is entirely sold out (and, by implication, now they have to wait till they receive batch #2 from China).
So, if someone draws the conclusion that for the next few weeks, no one is getting singles, I cannot blame them, because I arrived at the very same conclusion (without publicly crying a river, however).

No. Power consumption of a VLSI chip is the sum the static power (i.e. leakage), which is almost negligible, and dynamic
power, which is (by and large) proportional to the clock frequency.


Yes.


Putting analog circuits on an all-digital chip is more difficult than you think.
The particular semiconductor process chosen for FPGAs is an all-digital, high-speed process.
Adding analog elements like a thermal diode, its associated amplifier and an ADC on an all-digital semiconductor process is something like squaring the circle - at best, time-consuming, cumbersome and costly.
Just because Intel can do it, don't assume a fabless manufacturer like Xilinx can do it.

This "45 chips (45 nm chips) for 45 grand" deal
- was announced in 2010 and may no longer be available or more expensive now (2 years down the road)
- does NOT include the tool chain, most notably Synopsys DC (design compiler) and several tools by Magma

Nobody seems to know how much the Synopsys design compiler costs, but the word on the street is, typically you don't buy it, but rent it, and the rent for one year is in excess of 100 grand.

Thus, including the tool chain, you are looking at approximately $3000 or $4000 per chip, not $1000

Excellent idea, I second that.

Being able to specify the start frequency and the maximum frequency would be ideal for those of us who:
- have inadequate air conditioning
- want to make sure the FPGA has a long lifetime
- want to install a smaller cooled due to space constraints (i.e., putting multiple vertically arranged boards into an enclosure)

The best hope now seems to be EldenTyrell, who has managed to fit three instances of SHA-256 (single SHA, not double SHA) into a Spartan6-150, however he wants to be compensated at market rates for his (admittedly brilliant) work, and thus it is unclear whether his bitstream will ever become publicly available.

Then there is wondermine, who certainly does not lack youthful exuberance and enthusiasm and maybe he can duplicate EldenTyrell's work and put it in the public domain.

If none of them comes through, it looks like we are stuck at 210 MH/s (Stefan == ZTEX).

If you tally the "shipped" numbers in this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67887.0;all you wind up with 17, unless I miscounted.

The good news is, they have now caught up to shipping singles that were ordered in mid-December. 
The bad news is, someone (gigavps) said that the first batch is sold out. 

So, my guess is they order a second batch now and will receive it in 4 to 6 weeks, then ship it out as fast as they can ship it out, which seems to be one or two per day. 

A full custom ASIC at current gate lengths (28 nm, 35 nm, 40 nm, 45 nm) is now several million.

I actually asked a buddy of mine who works as an ASIC designer here in Silicon Valley whether we could just slap Stefan's Verilog code into his Synopsis or Cadence workstation at work, and I'll pay the 25 grand for a multi-project wafer somewhere, and his answer was, yes, he could certainly compile the Verilog code into RTL, and maybe even simulate the RTL, but there's much more to an ASIC than that, for instance the physical layout and physical verification, which he cannot do by himself. Now, if I had two friends at that particular Silicon Valley company, one a Verilog/RTL guy and the other one a physical design guy, maybe it would be possible to "moonlight" this over the course of several months...

But I don't and it isn't.

OK, here's one: This was after I had sold my 2-seater Cessna 150, and while I was renting planes. Arriving at the airport, I find out that all 2-seaters, which I was intimately familiar with, were rented out or in the shop, so I decide to suck it up, pay a little bit more and rent a 4-seater (Skyhawk) instead. I had been checked out in one during the BFR a few months ago, but it wasn't what you call "fits like a glove". So I take off, fly to, whatever, Monterey or something, enjoy the coastal scenery and the toy houses below and finally get back to the home airport and land. Turns out, being not 100% familiar with a Skyhawk, I land going too fast. So what does an airplane do when you land at too fast a speed? It does what it's designed to do, it takes off again. A little. It starts to hop down the runway, doing these little bunny hops. Would be a fun thing to do (the hops don't damage the landing gear or anything), except for the insignificant little fact that while you're hopping down the runway, you cannot brake. So the shopping mall conveniently located at the end of the runway starts to get larger and larger in the windshield, as I'm still hopping down the runway at 70 knots. If you panic now, you're dead. So training and survival instinct take over, I push the throttle forward, retract the flaps and pitch the airplane into best climb angle. The shopping mall is now filling the windshield, but the airplane is light, with but one person inside, and the engine does its job and finally there is a positive climb and the airplane clears the shopping mall. Once again I enter the landing pattern, but this time I land 5 knots slower and it doesn't hop and I can brake and turn off the runway.

My point is, you haven't really lived until you have almost died once.

Or foolish. Time will tell.

But old people mostly regret chances not taken, opportunities not pursued in their younger years. People rarely regret living an adventurous life - even if an opportunity doesn't pan out, at least it's a good story to tell...

Don't get me started telling you about the time, more than a decade ago now, when I bought a Cessna airplane without knowing how to fly it (but planning to take flight lessons in it). After finally getting my license and making the skies over California a little bit less safe than they used to be, I ran the numbers and found out that renting would be much cheaper, going forward, and I sold the airplane again. But it's a hell of story to tell and I don't regret it a bit.

Companies may have good reasons to play their cards close to the chest, for various reasons such as not wanting to give their competitors any information into lot sizes and price breaks etc.

So, typically, such information will not be disclosed.