Order book is still open. Currently orders placed today are being quoted for July delivery.

The main holes are specified at 4.5mm for a 4mm thread to pass through. Heatsink holes are 3mm.

We will be fitting an Arctic F12 fan as standard.

The Issue 1.1 board is 6mm longer. We added 2 extra holes on RHS so that stacking didn't have to use the fan mounts which incidentially are on a 105mm grid that's standard for a 120mm fan. I will try and get a basic mechanical drawing put together this week for the Issue 1.1.

The offer price is until the end of June. After then it goes up to GBP £600/ US $960 and goodness knows how many Euros.

We don't expect the market for the singles and duals to be anywhere as big as the quads. There are a lot of static costs in building these boards which don't change between the 3 versions and the quad is always going to look better and yes we are going to look at something bigger and more on that later. You will just have to wait in anticipation before we show where we are going.

We have done the singles and duals more as a technology tester for people that are in say the GPU world and don't want to spend a huge amount of money trying out something rather than them being the ultimate solution.

As to shaving voltages we are already testing something along those lines on a different product that uses the same regulator circuit as Cairnsmore1 and it might make it to Issue 1.2. More mundanely we are going to do some performance testing against voltage settings and then set the regulators at where we think is maybe the best point in production. Whilst there is something to gained out of this there are places where we think that much more can be achieved and more on that will come in the coming months.

We will be looking at this side over the next few weeks to determine who to talk to and what to do.

Do remember we are still going through a very big learning process and the hardware is only now coming in decent numbers. The hardware design and manufacturing side is something we are very good at but don't confuse that with it being simple. It takes an awful lot of people time and others resources to run such a large, rapid volume ramp, build like we are doing with Cairnsmore1 and keep it on schedule.

Yohan

Schedule update

We are maintaining our schedule for production and whilst we can never rule out a problem occuring that changes this schedule, e.g. like a PCB manufacture issue, we should ship between 20-50 units in May. We will be asking payment from some of you next week.

The first week of June should see more of you get units.

The second week of June there will be few shipments partly because we are waiting for heatsinks but also the major public holidays that are in the first week of June will limit assembly output from that week which forms basis of shipment in the second week.

Week3 of June will see shipping pickup substantially once next batch of heatisnks arrive.

Yohan

This is one big difference that you will find with FPGAs and a big advantage over GPUs especially when loading isn't constant for whatever reason. A XC6SLX150 FPGA can run from a few hundred mA when an easy design is loaded or throughput is reduced. The actual current depends highly on the clocking rates and the design loaded. From what I have seen the best GPUs still take about half the power when lightly loaded.

We selected 12A capability given what other boards seem to use i.e. 8-10A. Runnning in the 8-10A zone also works with our regulator choice and it is in a better efficiency band than when running at 12A.

In the unlikely occurance of a fault our sectioned power also allows a faulty section to be turned off and also limits damage should a short occur. It would be much worse if we had a single 48A supply and that got shorted also taking down the whole board at the same time. 48A tends to vapourise tracks and do significant damage to anything on the current path.

Yohan

Currently quad is still at the offer price of GBP £400/ US $640 / 520€. Delivery is currently quoted at July but July capacity is going rapidly.

The isn't as cut down as we might have achieved with a fully optimised design but the upside is the standard PCB between all of the Cairnsmore1 variants and common components. We also get to test one PCB design for three products. With the sectioned power supply approach of the board we do get to leave off the 12A regulator circuits when a FPGA position isn't used. It's also entirely possible that the dual and single options will return a slightly higher performance per FPGA due to the same PCB taking less heat.

We could also do things like remove the clock generator and some of the power options to save a bit more but we have left those for flexibility. There isn't much we could save on the PCB by doing custom PCBs for duals or singles. The numbers that we are building the quad in gives us a good price on a PCB that was engineered in the first place to be cost effective whilst also designed for performance. Once we have the performance numbers I hope that will be proven out in hard facts.

Yohan

That is a picture of quad. We have not built a dual or a single as yet. The $640 for the quad is only until the end of June.

Dual and single versions pricing now released. Shipping from July. Seperate thread running for these versions https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81569.0 .

Yohan

The order book has opened for Cairnsmore1 single and dual versions. We will ship these from July but are taking pre-orders now and there is a launch discount on orders placed before the end of June.


Dual version GBP £400 / US $640 / 520€ (discounted GBP £300 / US $480 / 390€).

Single version GBP £300 / US $480 / 390€ (discounted GBP £250 / US $400 / 325€)

More detail on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html.

Yohan

Ok so time for a little more info.

We have enough heatsinks arriving next week to do the first 100 boards so that is good and solves the problem for May and early June shipments. We might have a little gap when we run out before our main batch arrives. The initial heatsink will be 10mm higher than the final solution. They are both from the smae family of parts. The higher one is about 1.5 Deg/W and the smaller 1.9 Deg/W at 200 LFM. at higher air flow rates they are very close in performance and both better again. That's why we choose to run with the smaller part as standard as it did not make much difference on thermal performance with our preferred fan option. These thermal resistance numbers are about half the thermal resistance of the Spartan-6 itself so they are not much of a limiting factor in the scheme of things. We can't do anything much about the Spartan-6 thermal performance that's with the Xilinx team that designed it so we just have to work with what we have and make the best use of it.

The second part of the cooling solution is an Arctic F12 fan which is a good balance of low noise (22.5dbA), long lifetime and high air blow. There are higher flow options but much noisier and we might offer those as an option somewhere down the line. Similarly copper versions of the standard heatsink make also be offered but only offer a little more performance for a lot of weight, direct cost, and shipping cost. 4 of the best are 0.5 Kg in weight and that is expensive to ship.

We won't ship a PSU as standard as many people will want to use options other than the 2.5mm jack. The weigh of these PSU is such the carriage will cost more than the PSU. However the 2.5mm jack ties up with 60W power supplies commonly available for LCD monitors at low cost. We may offer a PSU as a cost option for those that want it to arrive ready to go but there will be the extra cost of carriage. We will attempt to test a range of models and list our results but that won't be immediately.

On the schedule we are probably 2-3 days behind our original schedule plan but we still expect the first units to ship in May. All of the array FPGAs are programming under JTAG and the local SPI flashes are working and do configure the FPGAs now. The controller we have more work to but it is running a basic build now and is generally ok so far.

The Issue 1.1 design is now frozen and that starts it's path though manufacture on Monday. We have added a fan monitoring hardware now to all 4 fan headers and that connects to the controller.

JTAG driving capability is in the controller and it would probably use a micro engine of the FT4232 to drive it but there are other options. Update of the SPI flash is also viable if support is built into the array FPGA design.

LEDs - each FPGA has 4 LEDs.

We have yet to look at Bitcoin bitstreams and the compatibility and performance of them with Cainsmore1 but I expect we will get some of that done next week.

Generally I am happy with our progress so far. We do still have some way to go yet but that is the norm for this sort of project. On the manufacturing side our component supplies are shaping up well and we now have very few problems now in area.

I think what we have achieved in the 15 days since we started is pretty good even though the team here do things like this on a regular basis. This time we didn't beat our record delivery for designing a major new board and sending some to a customer fully tested but you can't win them all. Maybe we should have run a night shift like we do on really critical project time lines and we could have shaved a couple of days off but that's all academic now.

More to come over the next week or so.

Yohan

Photos of the fully populated Issue1 now on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html.

We are still pretty much on schedule at the moment. Our biggest restriction is still the arrival of our main batch of heatsinks which arrive 14th June currently from China. We are trying to get enough of that batch air freighted for when we want them. We do have a small supply already procured and in our stores that will let some boards ship in May. We are also looking at some alternatives that we can get quickly if air freighting doesn't work. The lack of heatsinks won't affect our ability to assemble boards or do the basic testing of the finished boards and we can stockpile a large pile of boards ready to fit the heatsinks as soon as they arrive. A large pile can then ship just after the 14th.

Other than the heatsinks we are in a good component supply situation for the May/June pre-orders and the few things we might be short of in July most look like they will arrive in plenty of time. It does always take a little while to get major builds like this going but it is something that we specilise in within our general board building business.

Yohan

At the moment we don't have any design issues and it's likely we will even make a handful of the Issue1's available for early access in a few days time to more advanced customers that can deal with it in the very raw state it is today. Over the next 1-2 weeks there will be a rapid development phase of the product as we get builds and software sorted out and this very raw state will migrate to something most people can handle.

The Issue 1.1 assembly start is currently targetted for about 21st of May and all being well with the Issue 1.1 some people will have their pre-order boards arrive shortly afterwards. We will probably only build 50 boards in the first week as a bedding in process for our line but that will step up in weeks following. Possibly not all of those made in the first week will ship in that week as we are tight on getting our first major heatsink delivery in. We already have some stock of heatsinks but not enough in yet for the first week's schedule. We are working on that heatsink delivery to pull it in to when we want it or alternatively looking to source an alternative heatsink for some shipments. As we go into June everything should step up a little as the long lead items flow in much larger numbers and many of our manufacturing constraints are no longer there.

I will give more of an design update once we freeze the Issue 1.1. After then we should also start to release the juicy bits of info everyone is looking for.

Yohan

Photo of issue1 PCB (bare) now on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html. We have also added some new holes to the issue 1.1.

Each of the UP/DOWN connectors has 9 signals to use. 4 go to the controller and we have notional allocated them as POWER ON, TX, RX and CLK but can be reused in a variety of ways. Our intention for these initially is to support a serial messaging set fairly much in the normal fashion.

The remaining 5 signals go to one of the array FPGAs and those are put in to allow some greater bandwidth if that becomes necessary.

At the moment we are still developing our ideas on this board but the Issue 1.1 design will freeze on Friday and head into manufacture then.

Yohan

It's a simple concept but we though it was worth adding now. It's a possibility that we could do a backplane that uses the down connector only but more mundanely we designed it for short ribbon cables so that we could have a stack that can be interrogated in a plug and play fashion. It also allows us to have an Ethernet option at a later date to run a stack of boards or even just save on the number of USB cables. It also allows us to switch on an entire stack in a phased manner to avoid large surges at power up.

This should be a good way for budget limited customers to buy the cheaper single and dual units in a modular fashion and we can say make 4 singles look like a full quad for software compatibility purposes. In this example you get a slightly bigger system but you can you use the same software setup.

The angling of the up and down connectors is deliberate for ribbon cable layout and that will become obvious why we did that when we show that in action.

The ribbon cable approach may be more flexible than a backplane as the number of boards in a stack isn't hard fixed. There will be a limit and that will depend on a number of things but more on that once we get playing with this interface properly.

New CAD image for the improved specification Issue 1.1 board on http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html. This is the Issue that will ship to customers. I'll talk a bit more what we are doing with this improved spec board Wednesday and Thursday with a general update on how we are doing as well.

If anyone hasn't had an email response for their pre-order please send again. We seem to have had a couple vaporised by our hosting providers spam filters.