Yes I just modified the post to make that clearer.

Ok time for a commercial nugget. We have decided a few things here in response to great support we have been getting from the vast majority of you all.

The first decision is that for any Cairnsmore1 order already placed/received or placed before the end of June we will allow the same customer to place orders up to the a total of the same amount again, and at the same price, anytime during July, August or September 2012. If by chance we have a better offer they will be switched to that and receive that pricing.

The second decision is that until the we reach 800 MH/s on Cairnsmore1 the offer price will be available for any new orders. The 800 MH/s performance can be by any available bitstream and that changeover is at our sole discretion. The pricing changeover will be announced in this thread. The post 800MH/s pricing structure will be announced at this point and not before.

Our third decision is that any of competitors, apart from ***, that operate in a fair way are welcome to take advantage of our silicon prices and have their unit built in our line. There will obviously be some discussion on the price to do this work and you may, or not, like the price but that is an offer essentially with no strings attached. You are welcome to use this offer or not. We believe that Bitcoin will be better served with a range of competing FPGA hardware solutions available and that is the spirit in which this offer is made.

Yohan

Guys sorry I have been a bit distant today and not done a few things I said I would do but thanks to *** I was run off my feet handling new orders and thanks to customers for all of those. I'm sure we will live up to everyones faith.

Dip switches - One of things I have not quite got to as yet. One thing I was reminded about is that the functions on the Controller dip switches changed mid production ship so this might cause confusion when you are playing with them. The normal positions should be the same if I remember right but what they change differs. Hopefully that makes some sense. This change came in about board 26. We are nearly ready to give out the programming software setup and that's already partially on our server albeit not linked in as yet. We are doing some final testing on virgin machines to check all is ok with that and putting together some instructions of how to use it all. Once that is in place everyone will be able to update their Cairnsmore1 Controllers to the latest standard. When this comes out we will be interested in any feedback on how we might make the process easier or better or indeed if you have any problems doing this.

Bitstreams - It is slow progress here and we are actually managing more time on our new original design that the Icarus rebuild. I am hoping that more time will be available as the week goes on and certainly next week. This isn't totally far from our own internal prediction for progress so I'm not worried by that and this more to reassure customers that it is moving albeit slowly. We are supported third party solutions as best we can so you are not just reliant on the Enterpoint team moving this forward. I expect we will reach a turning point fairly soon on what we are doing in bitstreams and then things will happen in a fairly fast and furious fashion.

Shipping -Reached a new high today with the shipment heavier than the courier that came to collect it. Our test, final assembly and packing lines showed a massive improvement today and the data looks very good. Numbers of boards that we struggled to handle last week were handled by half the staff with time to spare. That's fairly key to us taking a big step next on the primary assembly line where we go to running two P&P machines instead of one. It's very much a game of balancing the different processes and we have some to do there.

Clocking - We do have problem with 100MHz clock on one particular FPGA position however we think we have a firmware fix that will solve that. It's not been fully tested as yet. It's also possible to run between 25MHz and 50MHz and to multiple it up locally at the FPGA and that way is stable for all FPGAs and one definate way forward. Icarus builds already do this going 100MHz to 190MHz and we can do the same from 50MHz or 25MHz to 190MHz or whatever is appropriate for a given bitstream. This therefore should not be a problem to any of our customers beyond this initial phase.

On June orders we are currently about 1 week behind the indicated schedule. However I am hoping that this week all of our lines will step up a big notch and we will start to recover our delivery timescales back to where we should be. We will know a bit more once we have analysed last weeks performance and we get a view on this week's progress. We did make a very big improvement in efficiency this week and I hope that will show in the coming week.

We do think we have a small stall coming in the first week of July so output will maybe down that week but then we should have 2 very good weeks of output before summer holidays reduce our output in the last week of July and then the very low output for August.

So for the moment your order indications probably won't be far from the actual delivery dates.

Yohan

Remember this is still only an temporary release of CGminer. It isn't much changed from the standard but there is more to come as we enable the extra hardware features that Cairnsmore1 has.

If I remember right all the dip switches are on(or maybe all off) except on SW3 and SW4 where the second bit in from the left (controller/cable end side) on both of those. All of the boards should have gone out with the correct settings already set. I don't have a physical board with me that would allow me to be more descriptive. Basically SW2/3/4/5 follow a polarity inverted Icarus setup. First and second bits from left are all that matter. I don't think the last 2 bits are used.

SW!/SW6 I think all switches should be set the side nearest the board edge. Some of the bits here control frequency and you can tell from the red LED flash rate if you get one of those. Others control JTAG functions.

I'll try and get a marked up picture to explain this on the website. It's just a job that needs doing.

There are temperature sensors next to every FPGA and we can sense fan speed on every fan header. Those features are not enabled as yet but will come eventually.

Ok CGminer (windows) is back and with source code.

As to BFL our consumer protection authorities always say if something looks too good to be true then it probably isn't. Technically those hashing rates could achieved in ASIC but I don't think the financial model stacks up. The technology they would have to use in my opinion would be very expensive. In my personal opinion it has the appearence of a ponzi scheme. Even if they somehow have a large enough market to make the financials work why would they hand away profit by pricing so low. They could offer x2 hashes per dollar and kill all of the competition off easily not x16 as they are. That does not stack up at all especially if a real VC is envolved. I know enough about them to be pretty certain on that.

Press releases without dates and real names smell like a very rotten fish.

BFL as far as I am aware don't have any timeline for delivery. It might be they are gathering orders and planning an ASIC development then based on holding peoples money to fund it. if that is what they are doing expect a very long delivery and maybe never a working product. It's not uncommon for ASICs to need one or more respins and that can be a very large amount of money and time.

As to doing an ASIC ourselves. It might be done in 6 months but that would be pushing it even by our standards. However I will say I don't think we have seen the best FPGAs can bring as yet. Not by a very long way. That's almost a BFL style statement and you can all ponder that one. Not to boast in any way but merely a statement what the team have done in Bitcoin, in the shape of Cairnsmore1, is extremely simple compared to what we do in size and complexity for the general HPC marketplace. Don't confuse that with being a poor product. I am exceptionally pleased with Cairnsmore1. It had a design target and we have mostly met that in the target timescale. I do think is that we probably have the most capable FPGA product in the Bitcoin market. None of you have not really seen what it is capable of doing as yet. I know several people have praised our product and I am glad at that response. It is always our target to please customers and the team have a large amount of pride in achieving that result. As an example very few people yet have the data for say the thermal performance and I can say it appears to have done everything that we aimed to do in the design. Particularly the rearward heat projection. That's not there by accident. The front heatsinking within the limits of the Spartan package is also working extreme well. The F12 fan can almost not be heard and absolutely blasts heat out of the board. I have personally taken a board without fan running at 80 deg to 30 deg in about 1 minute by turning on the fan. That's good measure of how good the fan/heatsink combo is.

Anyway one more piece of speculation for you. Anything that BFL can actually bring to the market we can almost certainly compete with with assuming we choose to do that. That's more a commercial decision that anything and if we had projects of better return we might do them in preference. I would say if I was running BFL I should be doing the same. That's one of the things that does not make sense in their offering. I don't need to say any more. You all have common sense I hope and you should use that and think through the difference between the way we run and BFL. I'm sure Enterpoint will still be trading in 10 years time which more that I can say for other companies.

Yohan

Thank you to those that support us and understand that we are still in a development phase still only 50 days since conception. To moaners you are free to cancel your pre-orders for whatever reason. We are also free not to supply either if we feel that the unit will not be of use to a customer and or the support of such a customer is detrimental to our other customers. We will strive to deliver what is best for the main base of customers and that will take a little time. I think I said right at the beginning I said the target to have most of the development done was the end of June and hence the early adopter pricing until then. I don't think we have seriously deviated from what we have said we would do in any aspect. We will also aim to keep you all informed about the good the bad and even any ugly as best we can and that is an ongoing part of our business ethics. Fundamentially I think we have the best FPGA hardware platform in the Bitcoin market. You are free to disagree on this this. It's just my personal opinion.

State of the Nation time:

CGminer will continue to be updated and we will release sources. We don't have any problem doing that or any commercial reason to withhold those. There is no commercial value in them to us as such. This might take a few days.

Bitstreams - Are on-going but hard to predict progress in any exact fashion. Our same staff working on this have been involved in improving our line and same goes for CGminer improvement and it is a compromise between spending time on one over the other. Generally this is improving and the design team are pulling back from manufacturing related tasks and more time is now going to the actual development stuff. So far there is no reason to expect that we won't have a unit into the 700-800+ Mh/s if not a lot better.

Hardware - We are switching over to the smaller heatsinks now in production. There are still a few units with the taller heatsinks to ship so you may get one of those. Results with the lower heatsinks are pretty much as expected and thermal perfomance is very good. We will try the option of additional rear cooling in a couple of weeks time and that is likely to be beneficial given what we have seen with our thermal imager.

We are hoping to have an alternative stacking pillar aimed a push-pull fan arrangements later this week or maybe the week after. We still need to source a fan bracket for that and it is on-going and no timeline on that as yet.

We are hoping to fit in the first simple power distribution board design this week and to make some shortly afterwards. The performance version with Ethernet support I don't have a timeline for as yet or a even full specification for as yet. It will come in it's own good time.

Shipping - We are maybe 1 week behind on our schedule but there is a reasonable chance we will catch this up in June and we are working to achieve this. Fundamentially we have made a lot of progress this week in moving to a smooth flow line which can deliver much more.

Yohan

Well I think it might be about as believeable. Oh shit we better run for the hills and hide in caves.

I'm not actually going to worry to much about any of these announcements and we will almost certainly lose a few customers because they believe the bullshit. That won't affect what we are doing. We will continue to supply good products for the market as best we can. If the market happens to die and maybe the Bitcoin is lost well we have 23 years of doing designs for customers and that business hasn't gone away, Quite the contrary.

The FPGA might have a few surprises yet.

Yohan

As I am something of veteran of press releases I will make a few observations that are odd for press releases.

The first is there is no expected date for products. It's usual to give customers some expectational of when it might be available.

The next observation is it doesn't even give the full name of who released it and even quoted in it. Again something that is normal to do.

Thirdly when VCs are involved it is usual to release who they are and how much they put in.

Now you might also say that I am being self centred on our business interests or even paranoid but the pricing they claim is probably unsustainable even in full ASIC. I could also be wrong about the market size and it might be sustainable. Now you might read think they are doing this to destroy competition and they probably will if their claimed prices and performance are achieved in a reasonable timescale. After the competition is destroyed well prices might then go up an awful lot. That's on the few reasons I can see that they would price this way. Even if they could make them cheap why sell them cheap. They could sell at the same price as us and still win big time and achieve the same.

A more paranoid reason might be a backdoor way to destroy the Bitcoin. I am sure that there are many governmental organisations that might what to achieve this. So being a VC with a relatively cheap investment of maybe a few million dollars would achieve this. It would reveal incomes of tax value much higher than investment andthere are plenty of other reasons as well for them to do that. Of course if it went wrong it's just a private company that did this.

Yohan

Ok we have removed as the person that has the source is not available to provide it right now. It was only posted as a temporary development release to help customers that were complaining about the lack of materials. It will be put back with sources when we have completed the work and everything is available in a stable form. Apologies to customers who this affects.

We are already shipping the larger numbers. Have been for the last 2 days.The heatsink arrival was always a potential shipping stopper so having a very large pile of them arrive is good.

At the moment we are probably a week behind on indicators to people early in the list but there is a good chance we will catch that up in the next week or so. We have done a lot more work this tweeking the test, final assembly, and shipping lines and now that we are moving into a smaller number, larger quantity, orders to ship every day it actually gets a bit simplier for admin side.

There is a CGminer (Windows) for the 50MHz shipping configuration now on the support page.

I think we have seen about 24-25W running in this mode.

Yohan

The main batch of heatsinks has arrived today so will be aiming now to raise our production levels.

I'm not best person to advise on Linux but we have been runing Ubuntu for our testing if you want to try that as an alternative.

Hopefully in the CGminer support materials we have coming today or tomorrow you have 2 options either to run our slow bitstream on 4 FPGAs or a standard Icarus at full speed on 2 FPGAs. The latter will earn you more return right at the moment.

Yohan

Yes that's all they are. Nothing complicated.

The USB drivers are now available on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1_support_materials.html.

We are expecting tomorrow, or Friday, to make 2 CGminer extensions available. The first runs the 50MHz build over 4 FPGAs. The second uses only the first 2 FPGAs with an Icarus bitstream at 190MHz so more or less standard level performance on 2 chips.

Also aiming for tomorrow, or Friday, is our VM front end that will be used for the programmer function.

There is not a defined limit but something like 10 units is reasonable unless maybe you are an earthquake zone. Of course if you are next to a wall you could use an an angled bracket at the top to steady the stack. Or use something like a mechano bar with holes across the top to brace to the adjacent stack. The whole arrangement is very flexible and what works in your space.

We still have to add the up/down logic function but that is coming after we make headway on the hashing and clear the initial drive/software bits. The up/down can be used over multiple stacks. Just needs a longer ribbon cable to take the end of one stack to start of the next and you can run your entire rig on one USB cable. That is the plan.

Picture is simple stacking where units are literally just stacking as they come as standard. Taking off the fan assembly allows side blow configuration that can use the up/down in the same way but board spacing can be tighter. It's not set yet what spacers we will support but a total height step of 40mm would fit nicely with 120mm fans in push/pull configuration. That would use 2 fans to cover 3 boards. 40mm would say allow 20 boards in a stack without being silly. Stacks of 10, 20 maybe 30 boards also line up well with high power ATX PSUs and our plans for a power distribution board.

At the moment power usage is very low but that's meaningless until we get hashing rates up.

Sorry guys we got abit distracted on something else today so drivers and software not quite finished.Meanwhile so eye candy showing the main parts of simple stacking.