So for an update on shipping times... As you might imagine, we get this question a lot. It seems like it would be a simple question to answer, but it's not. Let me describe the process so people can better understand why.


If you look at the current FPGA board in a Single or MiniRig, you'll see lots of capacitors, resistors, etc... about 350 little tiny parts attached to the board. Contrary to some of the conspiracy theories out there, all our boards are completely custom made, they aren't purchased from another manufacturer, etc... they are designed by us and made for us and us alone. As such, we are required to volume source every single part that goes on the board.


The ASICs are similar in so far as they also have nearly 350 components on each board. With the FPGAs, we sourced parts in the hundreds or low thousands at a time. For some of the ASIC parts, we are sourcing hundreds of thousands at a time which requires direct ordering & lead time dependancy from the respective manufacturers. However, for this first batch, we're mostly able to depend on available distribution stock from places like Mouser and DigiKey. Shortly after we get the first batch of everything in, we'll have our larger mega stockpiles arrive from other vendors and/or direct from the distributors, it's just the first batch that's going to be rough.


So, we've got he myriad distributors shipping thousands of little pieces to us, the PCB manufacturer sending us the bare PCBs, the HSF manufacturer sending the HSFs to us, the PSU manufacturer sending the PSU's to us, the case manufacturer sending the cases to us and most importantly, the fab sending the ASIC chips to us. All of these must arrive on time and as expected for everything to go off without a hitch. So far, so good.

Q: when


> From BFL forums
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showthread.php/104-Shipping-in-2-3-weeks/page8

Ok, so we have the cats herded, the specs staked out, now we have to actually build these things. As many of you know, we've purchased SMT machines to allow us to manufacture our own boards - and I have mentioned this before, but many have not heard it - we will not be using the SMT equipment to process our first batch of boards; we will be using the same house that did the pick and place for our previous generation products, which means we're still at the mercy of someone else for our first batch shipments. There has been some delays at that stage, but we have the padding, so it's not been a critical issue. There has also been some delays at the foundry, but again, we have padding, so it's not been a critical issue. We are also paying for an expedited run at the foundry (which does not come cheap) to keep our timeline up. All these things have to work out perfectly and our timeline is still looking good. However, if something does not work out perfectly, our timeline is going to slip, plain and simple. We've used up most of our padding at this point and we are still ironing out a few little wrinkles here and there. This has been a long explanation for a simple answer: I would like to tell you we are still on time or pretty close to it, because we are. However, I would also like to tell you that we are going to slip a couple weeks or so if anything goes wrong, and given the complexity of the issues facing us, I would say it's almost inevitable something will crop up between now and the beginning of November that we are not expecting; What that is, I don't know yet, but I would rather error on the side of caution, say the timeline is going to slip a little bit and then surprise everyone with an early delivery than promise an early delivery and not meet that promise. So that's what I'm doing and there's your answer. When I have more information, I'll let people know as soon as I can.

After seeing pics of the Single SC and Little Single SC-  
Thermal Characteristics:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the limiting factor for overclocking these ASIC chips will be the plastic top layer on the chip itself.

this whole power debate is exactly why i have always planned to set up solar/wind/whatever power sources asap for any significant mining effort. ...i should set up a solar selling business for BTC...

Assuming bASIC and BFL ship around the start of December.

By the end of Decemeber, I expect bASIC to have shipped all units .

~800 * 54 = 43 TH/s (assuming bASIC performance stays at 54GH/s..it will most likely be higher)

BFL has more orders and more man power...let's be really conservative and say they ship 75GH/s in Dec.

thats 43 + 75 + 22 = 140 TH/S bare minimum

So that IS ~7X difficulty from day ONE for Avalon customers. I believe your "conservative" ramp up numbers are not conservative enough.

Regardless, I'd say a very "conservative" guess is that within 3 months of Avalon's release, difficulty will be over 10X (IMO, easily). Long terms calculations should begin a minimum of 10X.

Everyone has been saying time-to-ship is the most important factor...well I'd like to look slightly further out than 3 months. The most that I can conservatively plan for is 6-10 months. Who knows what the landscape will be like several months from now.

My outlook for the short-medium term is 10x-30x difficulty. All 3 major offerings will be profitable during this time...how profitable depends on power cost.

Since BFL has published (confident) power numbers...let's use them as a baseline.

Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 60W = $0.14
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 100W = $0.29
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 200W = $0.48
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 400W = $0.96

Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 60W = $0.36
Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 100W = $0.60
Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 200W = $1.20
Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 400W = $2.40

25 BTC/block @ 30M difficulty @ $12 USD/BTC = $12.07 / day

Let's look at how much profit is effected by power

using 60W as baseline
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 60W = baseline is 0% more profitable
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 100W = baseline is 1.27% more profitable
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 200W = baseline is 2.94% more profitable
Cost per day @ $0.10 @ 400W = baseline is 7.38% more profitable

Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 60W = baseline is 0% more profitable
Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 100W = baseline is 2.09% more profitable
Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 200W = baseline is 7.72% more profitable
Cost per day @ $0.25 @ 400W = baseline is 21.10% more profitable

Obviously, as difficulty goes up, profitability goes up. As such, the affect of power usage on profitable also goes up.

Some people might say 5% is nothing...we tip pool operators that much. Others are trying to maximize every penny. Granted, Avalon now claims a 10% edge in hashing power (over BFL)...I am uncertain how long that edge will last. Both bASIC and BFL have stated that there is (perhaps significant) room for improvement here.


I have orders from each of the big 3, so I'm not trying to bash Avalon here. As a customer I just want a great product that will give me a decent bang for my buck.

BFL offers good hash rate with lower power.
bASIC offers good $/GH...still waiting for power numbers.
Avalon still has good $/GH (with bumped specs)....still waiting for power numbers.

I tried to diversify for the first run of ASICs, but if/when I decide to order more units...I'm looking for the best bang for the buck going forward.

Congrats, you just made a point that hurts the ASIC sales across the board.

If your words are taken literally, then the ASIC sellers are selling people very expensive lemons that will take a year or more to get their investment back....and then.....*barely any profit* per month.

As far as the "barely any profit" per month goes, that only applies to devices with GH/w ratios.   The more efficient devices should remain profitable for a very long time.

Sure???
So, from where does the expected increase of the difficulty about 10x or 20x?

why you calculate with a single mining device? why not .. with 5 or 10?

60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 20 + 85 = 405 watts (not including an active monitor) (for 300Gh/s)
60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 60 + 20 + 85 = 705 watt (not including an active monitor) (for 600Gh/s)

so, what do you mean with your statement above?  

What kind of major business expenses pay themselves back— passively no less!— in just a year?   Perhaps 7%/wk is more to your liking? Those tastes are catered to in other parts of the forum.

There are major risks in mining— including the risk that all that fancy hardware could be worthless before it arrives due to a loss of interest in Bitcoin, security flaws, legal attacks, etc. Or things like breakthrough optimizations for SHA256^2 allowing massive speedups on equal process or someone somehow doing a major run a vastly better process... just to name a few.

Meanwhile y'all have been ordering devices without concrete specs (including BFL customers— a substantial amount of pre-ordering happened when they were saying nothing about power at all!) which makes concrete reasoning about returns impossible if uncertainty about the future difficulty and exchange rate hadn't already made it impossible.

And after that, you're worried about some months difference in payback timeframes for some estimates?  Suicidal.  I hope no one has put money into these asic preorders that they can't afford to lose.

The difficulty will be 10x within four weeks of the first ASICs that start shipping, be it BFL or Tom's offering.  After a month, most of the back orders of both companies will be well into consumers hands and the difficulty will rise.  6 months?  It will be a lot more than 10x by then.

Your ROI vs Power Consumption is based on your cost for power and if you're assuming cheap power to base your calculations on, I think you're doing a disservice to a lot of miners.  There's no reason to only mine if you have cheap power - you should buy power efficient devices.  

It's pretty irresponsible to even suggest that power doesn't matter, if for no other reason than the environmental impact.  It's a travesty when people mine with inefficient devices just because they aren't the ones having to pay for that power.  But someone, somewhere, is having to pay and it's costing the environment no matter who's paying the monetary bill. Everyone should be striving to have the most power efficient mining devices out there.

I believe your email was a complaint about Inaba (please excuse me if I am wrong).  We are addressing customer concerns in first priority. 

The 1/3 rule for shipping only applies to orders placed in the first month. They said that after that, they would ship orders normally, as they do now: by order number.

+1 I sometime have to wait a day or two to initially respond if they're busy, but they always respond quickly after that, and have helped me out plenty of times.

Due to requests by numerous customers I added DHL Express Shipping to btcfpga.com

It costs $60.00 make sure you login to the same account you used to purchase our miners with

It has been added to make things fair for international customers - some countries in the EU for example it can take weeks to months to get a USPS package through customs.

If are domestic you are welcome to puchase this as well if you want but it will only get it there 1-2 days quicker than Priority mail which you already paid for.

Also if you buy the DHL you will not be refunded the $30 you originally paid. I made the price only $60 because I already took into account the $30 you have already paid.

Ill BBL but am reachable by phone

Tom
(315) 514-0269

It's not always easy to find something there, so the link is: the back of the board

Does this mean, Avalon uses chip technology of 2005?

Avalon is TSMC 110nm G

110-nm option ready
At the technology symposium, TSMC managers said they are ready to begin production of a 110-nm process, essentially a 10 percent linear shrink of the company's 130-nm process. Wei said many TSMC customers opted to use the 150-nm (0.15-micron) process, saving money on die size compared with the 180-nm process. The popularity of the 150-nm option led TSMC to develop a 110-nm process.
The 150-nm process was a 15 percent linear shrink and required a separate set of design rules, Wei said. The 110-nm process does not require new rules, and customers can "directly shrink their 130-nm designs by 10 percent and get 20 percent more gross die," Wei said. "For large chips, there are some yield advantages. And we estimate an 8 percent improvement in transistor performance in the back end of the line."
TSMC is ready to accept production for what it calls the "LV-plus" version of the process, for low-voltage applications. The 110-nm "G" or general-purpose version will be ready in the second quarter of 2005. TSMC does not plan to offer an LP, or low-power, 110-nm process.
For some customers, the smaller die size could result in a 20 to 25 percent cost savings, Wei said, even though TSMC will charge more for 110-nm processing because the mask costs are "a 40 percent markup from the 130-nm process."

The 110-nm process offers tighter interconnects, he said, and the supply voltage remains the same as for TSMC's 130-nm processes, largely because the gate oxide thickness was not changed.

Even as it offers the 110-nm process, TSMC is telling its customers of the advantages of moving to 90-nm design rules. The 90-nm low-power process will be offered first, before the general or high-performance process offerings, largely because the high-volume cell phone chip customers will be the first to switch to 90 nm.

Wei said the 90-nm process, which will be qualified this summer, will increase the device density sharply: At 130-nm design rules the SRAM cell size was 2.43 micron2, shrinking to 0.99 micron2 at the 90-nm node.

Partly because all of the 90-nm chips will use a low-k process, TSMC expects that most applications will see a 30 percent performance improvement compared with the 130-nm process.

I was wondering why I couldn't see edits when I was using the default forum skin, but I didn't have time until tonight to figure it out.

Do not use the Forum or Board Default, which is what 67k people are using.  That is the Bitcoin Theme without last edits.  Use the SMF Default Theme - Core, which is the default theme that came with the forum software.  Only 30 people are using this theme.