I'm assuming you also turned up the voltage to get to 250MHz?

Come now, nobody needs beer. Complaining about a shortage of luxury items as a comparison to a shortage of utilities seems kinda foolish.

For the record, my town is home to the biggest St Pats festival in the state and I don't drink but am frequently cynical.

Also our utility provider is something of a member-owned rural cooperative, so presumably not evil. It also appears to be not evil by merit of my non-industrial rates being pretty low compared to a lot of other folks, that low rate being flat regardless of time of day or year, my bills being thorough and accurate, and stuff like if we wanted to upgrade service at the shop they'd pay for the transformers and installation and my rates would go down if we used more power and at the end of the year they credit surplus funds back to customers. It's kinda nice. I don't know why so many people look down on Missouri. Which is also home to Anheuser-Busch, whoopty-doo.

Speaking of monopolies dominating markets, anyone know if anyone's going to bring Bitmain some competition anytime soon?

The Compac looks like a U3 to cgminer, which would be a problem if he was using cgminer. He's using bfgminer. If you're not using BFG 5.3 it shouldn't recognize the Compac at all. Luke-Jr will have to answer questions regarding why it would be detected as an AntMiner. Might be a remnant of the same detection scenario, in which case you should specify your AntMiner devices in the one instance instead of going general.


That's my fairly insensitive way of telling you to check your spelling.

One problem you're having is "compaq" has nothing to do with bitcoin mining. I don't know if that's the entire problem but it's surely part of it.

We were working on an idea like that earlier this year too; never got to prototype but the idea is sound.

I may be interested.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust transactions.

I wouldn't advise buying more than a few dozen of any chip without first playing with samples, whether they be engineering samples or final-version or whatever. Even if a design needs to be changed to accomodate the final product, having samples that are at least in the ballpark gets you in the ballpark and gets you there a heck of a lot sooner than waiting for production chips.

Are you using the recently-released version 5.3.0 as explained here, here and in a couple other places?

Speaking of, questions like this should be fielded in the product support thread linked above - as explained here and here in the last few days.

mindtrip - yours shipped Tuesday.

Making the S4+ with BM1382 was silly, but they did it anyway and made serious profits.

I'm assuming you mean hashrate of the sticks, not pace of manufacturing. Either way the speed's pretty good. Referring to the sticks, I'm pretty sure with the fairly mediocre fan we have on 'em (it's about a decade-old 120mm 12V 0.68A) you can tell the heatsink is warm but it's nowhere near hot enough you couldn't leave your finger on it indefinitely without discomfort.

At 400MHz you should see about 10W on the chip. The chips run that hot on an S5. The buck circuit is at about 3/4 max rated current.

I'm really glad we went with the buck circuit we ended up with instead of trying to make do with the original. Actually with the ramp-init code we have in BFG and cg-gekko the original buck would probably work because the current dump to light up the chips would be a lot less. However, that thing would cut out above 10A giving us a practical ceiling of about 350MHz and, being a small monolithic chip, would have been harder to keep cool than our great big FETs so top-end reliability would suffer. If we'd used a buck like you'd see on any other stickminer, with probably 5A peak current, you'd be looking at a practical peak around 200MHz. The power systems as designed will probably take you to 500MHz if the ASIC could handle it, which is what makes this stick so freakin' sexy. I mean anyone can make a stick miner out of a chip as good as the BM1384. The key to making it special is to give it some great big whopping testicles.

My mom plans on living to 100, and I'm her retirement policy, so I need to see at least 74 which carries me to 2060. Gonna be interesting to see what the network's doing then, when block rewards are about 0.01BTC per day.

If I remember, I'll set up a stick pointed at this too. Most of the ones we've built get cycled directly into testing and shipping, but we kept the venerable #1 (being the very first fully functional Compac assembled on the robot and bearing the first serial number) for the museum shelf.

Not to brag too much, but we're seeing 110GH right now on Eligius. 22GH of that is a two-chip test board I've left running for a while. The other 88GH is four Compacs.

Oh yeah also we shipped about 72 sticks today. This includes both Canada and Venezuela groups, and a set to klintay for eval and possible resale. There are only 20 sticks left in the small queue, and if they keep coming off the machine like the last two panels did, I can put up 40 sticks in a day.

Asked, and answered, all over the freakin' place for the last month - including about seven hours ago.

Bit Innosilicon isn't willing to sell sample chips. Right now they're looking for large batch investments, which sure as heck isn't gonna happen without playing with a few first to make sure they work right. If PC hasn't heard fresh news from Innosilicon, I have to assume that's still their stance.

If PC gets SFARDS chips PC won't get GekkoScience boards. I've said it a dozen or two times already, but big BGA is stupid and hard to work with.

We have parts right now for 400. It won't be difficult to extend that to 500. After that we'll have to re-buy a lot of the expensive components in bulk. The hard-limit limiters are PCBs, heatsinks and ASICs. We have enough of those for 1000 units.

While it would probably be super easy to modify the Compac to BM1385 (probably just change footprints, possibly voltage range) I'd just as soon not mess with it unless there's a lot of demand. And, from a business standpoint, I'd rather not put that out until the existing Compacs are all sold or I'd have a couple grand in chips and PCBs with nowhere to go.

The first (and probably smallest) product I'd put out with new chips (if I had enough) would be the pod miner intended to use a CPU cooler.

I'm not surprised BM isn't selling chips either. I didn't figure they'd let any sample chips go until at least after the S7 was shipping. I'm surprised they're not even responding, though. Usually they'd at least say something.

What are you punching that into? For one, the dot-slash is a Linux thing, don't need it on Windows. For another, if it's just wanting pool URL, all it needs is the stratum.mining.eligius.st:3334 portion. Looks like you're trying to feed the entire command line into an already running process?