OK then, another Q&A item:
Q: Will I get my $2250.- deposit refunded if I am not able to get the initial reduced offer price?
^this I've already seen it said that over 30 orders have been taken. If you are sure of being able to raise $15K but not sure of $30K - you'd be crazy to order. This concern seems so bizarre to me that I'm concerned I may not understand it. An order, or a deposit (submitted concurrent with or after execution of an escrow agreement) is for a unit at a specific price. Who would be crazy enough to provide a deposit against an "order" at an unspecified price? Exactly. At some point, they will send you an invoice and ask you to wire the deposit into an escrow account. If the invoice states "wire $4,500", I will simply not do that and thus there is no contract between me and them. If the invoice states "wire $2,250", I will happily wire the $2,250 into their escrow account. What I would like to see is a hardship clause in the contract, that in case of DOCUMENTED hardship situations such as serious illness, job loss, divorce, natural disaster the buyer has the right to get his deposit back instead of forfeiting it. This would add a much-needed human warmth to this icy, windy world of Bitcoin mining. |
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OK then, another Q&A item:
Q: Will I get my $2250.- deposit refunded if I am not able to get the initial reduced offer price?
^this I've already seen it said that over 30 orders have been taken. If you are sure of being able to raise $15K but not sure of $30K - you'd be crazy to order. It has nothing to do with "being able to raise" but it has all to do with - having only $15K liquid, but $30K (or more) tied up in investments - accepting the low, but non-zero risk of an anticipated 100% ROI, but not accepting the significant risk of an anticipated 50% annual ROI (i.e. at $30K it'll take about 2 years for the box to pay for itself) I'm in for one at $15K but it'll be a freezing day in hell when I order one for $30K. Very simple. |
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Since you are initially targeting the well-known Spartan6-150, maybe you can focus your youthful energy and enthusiasm on fitting three SHA-256 instances into the FPGA, and then fine-tuning these instances to about 100 MH/s each (300 MHs/s total), and then releasing the binary, unencrypted bitstream into the public domain.
That would make you a hero and a living legend on this forum.
While I admire Eldentyrell's technical expertise, I admit that I do have issues with his idea of getting "fully compensated" for his near genius-level optimization. Fully compensated at what hourly rate? A technical consultant (hardware, software) in Silicon Valley will typically bill at an hourly rate of $100 & up. A Silicon Valley lawyer bills at $300 & up. A psychiatrist bills at $400 & up. An anesthesiologist bills at an hourly rate of $700 & up. So, if he has invested 500 hours into this, does he expect $50,000? $100,000? $200,000? I seriously doubt that he will be able to raise amounts of this magnitude on Kickstarter, which leaves the FPGA mining community stuck at 210 MH/s (ZTEX bitstream).
Please consider it.
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After careful analysis (read: a spontaneous gut-based decision which will probably come back to haunt me), I have put my name down for one.
I was almost considering ordering two, but I don't like to put all eggs in one basket - I already have 12 BFL singles on order and don't want to cancel them, as at least the first one of them should arrive in about 2 to 3 weeks (my guess), down from "4 to 6 weeks" (BFL website).
The 12 BFL singles will dissipate about 1000 W and the C200 about 100 W, for a total of 1100 W - which should result in a more comfortable temperature in the office than now with three 4-card mining rigs running and heating up the room like a sauna.
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Has someone taken the time to include all FPGA related threads to this section ?
No, notably absent is the Icarus thread and the two LargeCoin threads. Why include the LargeCoin threads here? Absent an ASIC sub-forum, IMHO the FPGA sub-forum is the closest match for all ASIC-related discussions. |
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We've read the forums, and after many conversations with customers, we have
decided to offer a 50% price reduction on the first 25 orders of the
LargeCoin C200 Integrated Mining Unit. To participate, please visit our
[2] order form if you haven't already, and give us your details. Someone
will contact you soon to arrange for your deposit to be placed into escrow
(now reduced to just $2,250). I got that too. Now I really would buy if I had the funds on hand.  Same here. I can come up with the deposit, but coming up with the remaining $12,750, that's another story entirely. I'm not ruling out placing a deposit, however. |
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I want to buy a few of these, but does it make sense to buy these if i get free electricity anyway and could buy used cards instead? power is not such a factor.
Maybe heat is. I found out the hard way that it is incredibly difficult to dispose of the heat generated by, say, eight mining rigs in a small room (window wide open to the point of being an invitation for thieves) or just three mining rigs in a small room where the window doesn't open. |
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I think we are now beyond the question of whether this is a scam or not.
Just from counting the guys who have posted about it on this forum, more than 10 systems have been delivered so far.
Thank you for your answer Inspector 2211. Is it known how many people did preorder? No, not in total, but why don't you take a look at this thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67887.0 and, if you have the time, tally the totals for "ordered", "received", and "not yet received", and post them here. |
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Guys, how many of you received their equipment? Is this company reliable or is this another scam? I would like to order few basic platforms, but I do not know if they can be trusted.
I think we are now beyond the question of whether this is a scam or not. Just from counting the guys who have posted about it on this forum, more than 10 systems have been delivered so far. However, that doesn't mean they cannot suddenly go under, for instance from cash flow problems or yield issues. Lots of small companies succumb to cash flow issues (less of a risk here because orders have been pre-paid for 4 months, giving them an ample cash cushion) or yield issues. Yield issues: What if they find out during QA that they have to [expensively] rework or even dump 70% of their circuit boards and can ship only 30%? Yield issues like that can doom a start-up company, when you spend more money per shipped product than you take in. Thus, I'd say, no, it's not a scam, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's 100% certain that you will receive product for the money you pre-pay. |
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I remember nghzang mentioned that going to 200MHz on chips was not suggested (chips got so hot), and he gave
out a bitstream with a "Use at your own risk". Three loops on the same chip suggests far greater number of
Registers is being used. Since each stage toggle rate approaches 50% (This idea behind Digest functions is that their toggle-rate
must approach 50% in each stage to be effective, and so is the case in SHA256), I wonder how hot the chips will get in high
frequencies, approaching 180MHz or 190MHz...
Hahaha - funny that you mention it. You guys have found that out the hard way, haven't you? (By the way, I have a total of 12 BFL singles on order, so I'm not anti-BFL at all.) But you are correct and you raise a valid point. At 200 MH/s, Dr. Tyrell's design dissipates about 8 W, and so it's fair to assume that it dissipates 12 W at 300 MHz, which is probably stretching the boundaries of a tiny 20mm x 20mm plastic chip like that. I mean, you can mount a big cooler on it, but there is a thermal resistance from the FPGA die to the cooler. Maybe these devices have to be run inside a freezer to successfully achieve a consistent hash rate of 300 MH/s and beyond. Time will tell. |
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That is what I meant. It seems this guy has found a way to speed up the hashrate using DSPs so what is so hard to understand Turbor and gigavps ?
He doesn't use DSPs throughout (because there are not enough DSPs to go around), but only at the most critical spots, i.e. where the adders feed into longlines. That's the brilliance of it. That's the design idea I had completely missed before. I was asking why couldn't BFL also do this "trick" and a valid question indeed. One bitstream or FPGA "trick" likely could be applied on a range of different FPGA hardware because the basic operating principles are the same for all FPGAs etc.
Agreed. I'm no expert but I understand ( reasonably well ) how FPGA works and this DSP trick allows you to do 3 loops of SHA256 in the same chip ( cheap Spartan 6 ones ) that previously only allowed us to do 2 loops etc.
No, using this DSP trick has nothing to do with being able to squeeze three SHA-256 instances into a FPGA. You can do that with the plain old stream-powered ripple carry adders. Using DSPs in a few strategic places, however, ensures that the critical path (a deadly combination of two 32-bit adder stages and one longline path) stays well below 5 ns, when otherwise (with ripple carry adders) it can barely achieve 5 ns. |
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BFL Single, watch out below. What makes you think this cannot similarly be applied to the single ( even after a hardware modification )  1. Consensus on this forum is, that the BFL Single uses Altera FPGAs of an unknown type (Stratix?) and one would first want to determine the exact FPGA being used, before speculating whether DSP blocks could be used to a similarly beneficial effect. Without knowing the exact FPGA make/model, it's way too premature to state that DSP blocks could be used there - maybe that particular FPGA make/model does not even have DSP blocks. or 2. Maybe they are already using this trick, maybe that's their secret sauce which allows them to reach 830 MH/s with but two FPGAs. Just my 2 cents. |
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Number of DSP48A1s: 30 out of 180 16%
Aha! Interesting. When uncle Moshe (Gavrielov) gives you DSPs, make DSPeade.  Thank you for providing an important puzzle piece on how Dr. Tyrell does it. The multiplier in the DSP48-block is not needed in SHA-256, hence what he obviously uses is the 18-bit adder BCOUT = B + D. He uses 30 DSP blocks, 10 per red / green / blue SHA-256 instance. For a 32 bit adder, two 18-bit adders BCOUT=B+D are needed. Thus, he can implement five 32-bit adders per SHA instance. So, why not just use [slow] 32-bit ripple adders everywhere, and use a few [very fast] DSP adders in some places? The answer is, IMHO, that he uses the fast DSP adders only where they feed into longlines. Were he to use normal ripple adders where he feeds into longlines, the aggregate delay would limit the design to a 5 ns clock cycle. Using the fast DSP adders will allow this design, when properly fine-tuned, to march into 4 ns clock cycle territory, for a total MH/s number of approximately 125 MH/s or approximately 375 MH/s per Spartan6-150. BFL Single, watch out below. |
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Potential bidders for the IP are altera, xilinx, possibly others (like terasic, etc.) and the BTC FPGA community. I know very little about the fpga market but
The topology makes use of a few Xilinx-specific features, so it would require effort to port that. However, the geometry is very Xilinx-specific. Porting to Altera is as much work as porting to a SASIC platform like eASIC. I'd guess that big players (altera,xilinx) wouldn't see BTC mining as a big enough market
Correct. This is still way below Xilinx's radar. How do you convince anyone that what you have is legit? You'd have to let them see something under NDA? What if they say "no thanks" and go do it themselves based on what they saw.
When there is a need for me to convince people I will be happy to give live, in-person demos here in NorCal. I'll even let somebody bring their own board but I have to keep the board afterwards. I'll probably need a ztex board at some point so when I do the demo we'll probably have somebody who doesn't know me bring a ztex board and I'll buy it from them as part of the demo. EldenTyrell, I'm here in the South Bay (with a home office in north-east San Jose and a business/mining office in Santa Clara next to Nvidia) and I have a ZTEX board and I can sell it to you for what I paid for it, or $50 less, or whatever we agree on. In case you put your bitstream up on Kickstarter, I'll also make a low-to-mid 3-figure pledge for early access to a 240 MH/s or better bitstream. (Right now, it's running at 209 MH/s and I'm not really interested in paying for, say, 220 MH/s.) |
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The good news : it can work in the US. The bad news : it is now 3000 W or needs that big a PSU for stable operation  & still no concrete details about dates or chips etc. No, not necessarily - the extra 500 W could simply be headroom. |
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I would be grateful if someone with good FPGA programming experience answers this question:
Is it possible to make use of both clock edges to improve the mining speed?
For example: replacing always@(posedge CLK) by always@(posedge CLK or negedge CLK)
Zhang've told me that this would lead to a disaster! I am still wondering if its possible to use a double edged clock design @ lower MHz "100->133"!
The top frequency for this fully unrolled and cascaded double SHA-256 is determined by one of the following two constraints: - Longlines from one stage to the next (as EldenTyrell has pointed out, longlines are used in the middle of both 64 stage SHA blocks, because the FPGA is simply not wide enough) - The 32 bit wide ripple carry adder, I think there are 6 or 7 of them per stage, two if them in series. Thus, if, say, one of these adders took 2.3 ns (guessing), then two of them in series would take 4.6 ns and that's that. (That said: I don't know which of these two constraints is the costliest/slowest/longest one, and I'd be glad if someone could point that out and specify both of them in nanoseconds.) So, just because you clock the flip-flops on both clock edges and thus halve the clock, your mining is not going to get any faster. |
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Unlike some of your other competitors. I won't say their name.  Nor are they 4 months behind.... I wonder why people produce a 4 month backlog instead of just buying a competitor's board (e.g. the X6500)... Is it because the X6500 is just listed as "out of stock" at cablesaurus, and people don't know that there's a new batch coming in? Why? Because people took vendor B's statement of a delivery time frame of 4 to 6 weeks at face value. That's why. People are gullible. I'm guilty of that myself, even though for me the wait has 'only' been 9 weeks, so far. I expect vendor B to take about one week to process two weeks worth of orders, so, according to that estimate, vendor B should catch up to my first order by early April, for a total time between order and delivery of 3 months. |
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http://datacenter.bz/ Just a few miles down the road from me in central Ohio. Smack dead in the middle of the transit route between Chicago and Atlanta. Appreciated, however a little bit too far for me when I need to swap a hard disk or a whole server or something. Right now, I have my dedicated servers in downtown L.A., and even that has proven to be a pain in the b*tt. 700 miles round trip. |
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13 Spartan chips per board, 50W per board -> FAIL |
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RJK: You're datacenter can't handle a power request like that? Ask them about private suites, they can usually handle larger power requests, at least the ones I use. 400 amps for a suite is not uncommon. If you are willing to suck it up on the open floor, you can get 220v drops and pull down 200 amps fairly easily as well. Did the specs on this thing say it was 220v or 120v?
I haven't seen mention of whether it is 120 or 220VAC. I was basing my datacenter comment on a single rack. I'm sure I could get a suite, but when half of the $600/rack/month cost is for power, and when you only get 40 amps for that, I dread to find out the cost for 400 amps and associated cooling requirements. Of course I could probably get a lower cost by requesting non-UPS power and minimal genset backup, but since I am not buying 40x of these, I won't be bothering to get a quote on that RJK, where do you get a full rack w. 40 Amps for $600? Seattle? I've been searching high and low for a deal like that in California, but the local offers are typically 20 Amps for $900. So basically, they tell you to stuff the rack full of Atom-based servers, or leave the rack half-empty... |
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