Export costs vary widely by country where it is being imported and the type of equipment it is. The key to all of this is the harmonised code which is a system that identifies the type of equipment and then the customs processor knows what duty level is to be applied. Duty is different from local sales taxes. Most countries have a mechanism for applying local/federal sales taxes on imports so you don't avoid those.

For sales between supplier and customers in different EU countries duties have been totally eliminated but sales tax (Value Added Tax - VAT) still exists and we have a system that is not totally different from intra-state system in the US. If we are selling to a domestic customer in the EU we will always apply VAT to the price. If the EU customer is a business, with a valid VAT number, we can ship without charging VAT ourselves but it is still due to the authorities local to the customer. This is backed up with a reporting system so that fraud doesn't occur and we report every VAT free shipment to a EU country.

As far as I understand it, and this is complex, US duties vary with sourcing country of the item being imported and the harmonised code used. They also used to have an associate tax called MFP which is very small, 0.02% from memory, as well. Generally as a country UK items don't get hit hard by duty as we are a friendly country. VAT does not get applied to non-EU countries. The hardminised code that we use for most of our products is a fairly low duty, or none, but Cairnsmore1 may be different especially if we ship it with bitstreams loaded i.e. a known function that changes the harmonised code. We are looking at what harmonised code we can use for Cairnsmore1. Once that is established we will publish that. Most of the couriers have duty calculators so cost can be checked.

South America countries have very high duty levels from what we have heard.

It is a F12 fan and blowing down. When it is stacked that way it will draw air over back of board above. Equally setting a stack heigh of say 40mm would allow reasonable side to side air flow especially if the ends are boxed as well. We are looking for a r/a bracket that will allow the side mount fans for the push pull fan arrangement but that is not high priority at the moment.

The F12 is a very quite fan with good airflow and long life. The way we did the mounts will also allow a heatsink and fan arrangement for the back if you want but that is maybe overkill. (cat fixed)

Some more to salivate over.

We have started to look at this and the services like Bit-pay do look like the way we would go for Bitcoin acceptance but we still need to walk though this properly and slowly. We don't want to run any volume on any new processing system in case there are problems and we would certainly get that if we said that this was available today. It's something we need to take time on and get right. Running the timeline on our build is enough to handle at the moment.

Something that is a little different to people outside of the UK is that we don't usually charge fees for Visa, Mastercard or PayPal processing but do generally limit the size of transacton to about £1500 maximum. It's always been an easy way for our customers to make small purchases like 1 or 2 boards. We run enough business through Paypal that the fee isn't too high to us and it looks nearly comparible to the Bitcoin conversion merchant handlers.

Yohan

We won't release details of our sources as that can be capitalised on by our competitors and finding these heatsinks took us a lot of research time. We will be offering them in our shop before long. The Enzotech parts are similar but in copper and we will be offering the equivalent of those as well. The copper parts are very heavy and don't offer a massive advantage over the aluminium we are using when air air is blown over them but some people will want them. The copper parts are also prone to mechanical damage as the copper is very soft. The samples we have here arrived with the vanes out of shape and the aluminium is much better in that respect.

At the moment we are not taking Bitcoins or margin is too slim to consider anything that we don't fully understand all aspects of and right at the moment we are too busy to do that work. The volatility of exchange rates is also an issue for things being delivered up to 1-2 months. All of our costs are GBP or USD and we have no other option to reduce exchange risk and to use those currencies. Even the euro is becoming a problem although we already margined that. Our margin there is gone in the last week or so and we are watching what happens there. All of these traditional currencies have a big momentum and rarely change quickly which cannot be said about Bicoin.

MtGOX haas been suggested but elsewhere in the forum there are reports of problems and possibly insolvency so that is a big problem for us to go that way until it is clear what is the real situation.

Yohan

We are looking to make this rack stand alone and yes it is up against Butterfly's larger products. We would like to make this run free of a host PC. This is very much a big system concept. I hope we do a better product that the competitors but time will tell on that point. It's very unlikely we will do a PCIe backplane for this although we are looking at these for our general HPC products. The bought in industrial backplanes are usually very expensive so it's unlikely we would but that in. However we can use one of our standard ones that we have designed or even a derivative of one of them. The cost is quite reasonable doing it this way.

I would forget any secondary value on any sort of mining kit. If you are banking on that your equations will be wrong. FPGA families have replacements on average every 2 years and the old family will have limited value even still as chips never mind in a system that has either to be reused or silicon recovered. GPUs are even worse for this. Try selling a 2-3 year old GPU. It might have cost £500 but in 2/3 years you can buy a brand new board of equivalent performance usually for less than £100. Second hand maybe it goes for £30. I for one would not want to buy a ex-mining GPU given the stress put on them but of course most people don't mention that on Ebay.

Yes that is very much the concept. That also allows the processing cards to be added to or even replaced with newer better ones some way down the line.

We are not likely to use PCIe in this way but it is a possibility for a quick picture have a look at http://www.schroff.co.uk/internet/html_e/index.html. So what we are taling about is a rack with card guides and a backplane at the back of the rack. The cards slide in and connect to the backplane.Another example http://uk.kontron.com/products/systems+and+platforms/microtca+integrated+platforms/om6060.html.

The backplane standard could be an industry standard or just something we do to suit the purpose. The main thing is that the metal work and supporting guides are standard things. With a full height 19" rack we might be looking at fitting up to 4-8 sub racks depending on height we adopt on the sub-rack and what we have in power supplies. So we might be able to do an entire rack with 0.5-1 TH/s if I can add up correctly. Then it is just a case of adding racks. In data centres you might find hundreds of these sorts of racks.

Lets start by clarifying that it won't be a single big board. Those are actually expensive to make and there is no logic in this design that needs that approach. The architecture is more of a controller card with processing cards linked by a backplane that wires it all together.The backplane should let us have 12 working boards maybe up to 19 in one run depending on design decisions made.

Similarly PCIe is a bit of overkill for this one internally but could be used to link a rack to a PC or several levels of rack. We might do a PCIe card but that is a different project.

28nm at the moment may not be viable especially Artix that is probably 6 months away. 28nm may also be expensive initially. With what we are doing on bitstreams, and partner offerings, might mean FPGA type might be relatively irrelevant. It's more about the system cost than anything. 45nm may still be the best option today but that is one of the things that we are looking at.

Voltage that is used for whatever FPGA we use is being looked at. We might put in a VRM but that is probably more complicated than is necessary and has it's own cost. There are other ways to do this.

Historically fans have been a reliability thing and we might put in monitoring or PWM but these features do have a cost themselves both in materials and electricity. That needs to considered given the fans we are currently using on Cairnsmore1 have 100K+ Hrs lifetime (11-12+ years) and have a 6 year warranty. The floating bearings that have come in the last few years are a lot to do with this reliability and alternative approach might be a planned fan replacement maintainence schedule.

A fan tray may be the way we do cooling for this design and that would have whatever fan headers are needed. We have some other ideas here as well and more on those when we have thought them through as little better to see if they are viable.

Power wise this will take power from the backplane and there won't be a choice there. The processing card isn't a replacement for Cairnsmore1 but for the bigger rack market. Different backplanes are a possibility including a mini setup maybe with a cut down number of slots but that is for later after we get the big solution out in the wild.

Yohan

Ok I will start this one off by saying that we are looking at a range of FPGA technologies to base the product on not that any of you might think we would start putting GPUs in our products although you never know. Some of our decisions will be based on how we do this week with more fully loading the Cairnsmore1.

We are probably thinking of 19" rack as a basis for this product and we already have some backplane designs that we did previously that might be useful either directly or in an adapted form. This also fits well with power supply availability and so on. This would also allow a modular purchase of a system that would be easy to upgrade and add to as time goes on.

One of our aims will is to be a very competitive FPGA solution in the market for large scale mining.

We have an initial individual card target of 4-5 GH/s+.

We are looking at our cooling technology and we are testing a new idea this week in a different product that might get adopted into Cairnsmore2.

Timeline - we are likely to limited by FPGA lead time which is typically 6-8 weeks so August-September is likely to be the initial availability of this system.

What we would like to hear from you guys is what you would like in interfaces? USB?, Ethernet - 100/1G/10G?, Cable PCIe?

And any particular features you might think we need to include?

Yohan

If you were interested in say mounting in a 3U rack a bolt-on mechanical board edge could be made to make the board the right width. A wider or longer variant of Cairnsmore1 would also be possible. That's only a few minutes of design time. It's then more a manufacturing thing where it splits the volume and we buy in 2 PCBs rather than 1. However if there is a serious requirement for this and enough orders say 25+ units we could do it for a small increase in cost. Other than the PCB all the other components can stay the same and we get the volume pricing advantages of that. Worst case (small numbers) the pricing delta might be about GBP £25 / US $40 per board. If that is of serious interest to anyone it is worth contacting us. It's something we can do without a serious effect on the current batch build. The current heatsinks should work well in a rack config if suitable runner spacing is used as we considered side blow when we choose them as much as the downward standard configuration.

First picture of the first manufactured Issue 1.1 now on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html.

On stacking the boards the initial shipments will have a 33mm high heatsink which with thickness of chip, fan and fixings makes about 60-62mm above board surface. Add about 5mm for board thickness and rear solder joint protrusion. Probably add 10mm+ above fan to let air flow and you get your simple stacking height of about 80mm. After the first 100 units the heatsink is 10mm lower.

The fan can also be removed and used for side blowing if you really want to pack them in and if you really want to keep them cooler use a push pull fan arrangement. In this way you might get down to a 40-50mm stack spacing. With the right r/a bracket, and suitable stack spacing, the fan holes on the PCB can be used to hold on 120mm side fans in a stack.

Some mechanical details now available on the temporary webpage http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html.

The initial performance numbers are high on our list now to do. This week has been a slow week and was planned that way so we could clear critical aspects of other projects and do other things that are ongoing.

We are expecting the Issue 1.1 PCB in today and once that is assembled we will do a quick basics check again and then move onto the integration and performance testing aspects of the project. It is then a how long question but if it goes well we will know a lot in about 1 week. If it doesn't go so well we may have to modify the PCB design and that is about a 1 week slip. That's the joy of engineering.

It's not a strange question and we didn't design it for any specific format. This time we just wanted to do something simple and that is what Cairnsmore1 is.

There are 2 things under consideration here.The first is that for the next generation we do design either with a specific case or racking in mind. We are also considering what we might do with the current Cairnsmore1 and we might do a simple case for these. Worst problem is then is the cost of shipping such a case.

Until we publish the data, or somebody else does, that's an academic question. Some patience is required but not too much longer to wait now.

Yohan

FAN spec looks good but I looked up the nearest distributor and no listing of the 12cm model that I could so it sort of suggests that it's very new and maybe not quite available yet.

We are committed anyway in a large way to the Arctic F12. It's pretty quiet and more to the point available in large numbers to us in a short leadtime. When you start looking at the quantities we are buying many of them have to take the boat from china and that's usually 6 weeks min delivery.

If people want they have the option to change the fan themselves it will be simple enough to do that.

VAT

UK VAT applies to all sales to the UK. It also applies to other EU countries unless we are dealing with an entitly like a company that has a local VAT number which we have to check and fully verify before we sell without applying VAT. We do then have to report all of these VAT free sales via ECSL so the EU does track this. The end entity then still has to VAT but it is in their own local system which is at local rate. I think most countries are similar rates to our 20%.

Outside of the EU we don't charge VAT but local taxes or duties may apply which will be usually collected by the courier.