BFL - 65 nm. KNC, 28 nm. Conclusion--exactly the opposite of yours here.
I still highly doubt they can have access to the 28 nm factories. It's still cutting-edge technology used mostly by big players with a lot of hard issues to solve. It's been in use since 2011. And you doubt that Orsoc has access to them? An ASIC/FPGA design-house with over a decade of experience and 10+ employees, most of whom are chip designers? Yes but BFL was initially slated to use 5 x less power than they do now they are shipping. They advertised and took large pre orders based on 1w a G/H. They are shipping at 5w G/H or slightly less for the bigger rigs.
I was not aware of that. It's very interesting if you consider the very long-term usage of ASICs: even them could become unprofitable to run given power costs! BLF outsourced their chip design to who knows who and ran into problems. Because you simply can't simulate a working ASIC design on an FPGA and copy it directly into a chip. You have to know the little tricks of the trade of turning an FPGA design simulation into a functioning ASIC. If anyone should know how to do this, it would be a long-standing design-house like Orsoc. It's not really surprising that BFL ran into problems, problems that it seems Avalon narrowly avoided and fore-saw, but it would be surprising if Orsoc runs into this problem, considering that they've been producing ASICs for years and claim that a hashing chip isn't even close to the most complex design they've completed successfully. I think too many of people's expectations have been colored by the difficulties of BFL and the like. These guys are pros. Anyway I'll stop here as this is off-topic. |
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So I guess for the sake of most conversations like this one, I define "the government" as just that parasitical class of evil rulers who specifically sold outf non-government employees like lobbyists for large corporations and banks that they take their orders from, so they fit in this definition too.
Well, this is very problematic. If 'government' is evil then how do you call the group of people taking desicions to make society work? You don't need a group of people making decisions for everyone else. Let people make decisions for themselves and only for themselves. Individualist government, true self-government, not collectivist. Where no one can force laws on you and you decide your legal circumstances entirely for yourself. |
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Dammit. I'd be like a 3rd-gen copycat if I stole it too.  Please do copy it and spread the word. The world seems to equate democracy and freedom, though democracy is actually just the tyranny of the majority (John Adams is credited with that phrase, though the idea goes back to at least ancient Greece). I found really clever and have officially stolen it for spreading ^_^ |
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I personally don't think KnC is done surprising us. They have exceeded expectations in regards to Hash power / $ and I believe they will exceed expectations in Hash power / Kwh as well. Sam's comments about not buying a PSU yet just prove it.
Loving KnC so far.
Would be hilariously awesome if they also shipped in August ^_^ Underpromise, overdeliver. |
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Where did the info on the units' sizes come from -- do we have a solid idea on what they will be?
Seriously, the site says 60x60x120, that better not be centimeters! I wanna get one into a datacenter <_< |
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Like what? Help a brotha' out  |
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You have to remember you haven't seen the final form Saturn/Jupiter will take. Those accepting delivery, may be a different form factor to those being housed, which will take more of a rack mounted server case form factor...
That would be fantastic. |
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EMS or DHL, hmm...  |
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BFL is crap, I better get a KnCMiner Jupiter. 350 GHs baby!
I would want to see a working prototype on youtube with a bitcoin dev pulling less than 5w G/H before put down any money on these. It would need to pull less than 1.75KW to compete with BFL. M The Jupiters are currently slated to use 1kw. |
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This will only leave BFL customers who got miners now and in the next 2-3 months going, unless someone launches something lower power per G/H. ...such as KNCMiner. Eventually unless the surviving ASIC manufacturers limit supply onto the market to match hashrate (thus controlling difficultly increases) then it will all go pop. Huh? They can't keep new suppliers from popping up. We have less than two years until this happens. And it will happen. Anyone buying anything other than BFL currently is nuts. BFL - 65 nm. KNC, 28 nm. Conclusion--exactly the opposite of yours here. |
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As long as the difficulty is lower than 800 million (assuming a btc/USD price of 100$), those devices make profit.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"You do realise that 800 million difficulty is less than six doublings from 19,339,258 right? And with difficulty growth @ 33% a month (or more!) difficulty is doubling pretty much every three months. I will let you work out the maths of how many months six doublings will take  M I expect the diff to level off a bit after the avalons and the KNCs ship. A doubling of network power constitutes the deployment of perhaps millions of dollars worth of gear. Double the network power and you're doubling the infrastructure investment cost. That can't happen ad infinitum. Even with a bitcoin price well above the generation cost, at some point an investment only makes sense if the price of bitcoin is assuredly higher than X in the near term, and we've been on a slow but steady downward slope lately and probably will be for the rest of the year, which should make further investment by large investors, like Asicminer, a little nervous. Imagine the price crashes down to 50 or 20, are they leveraged enough to stumble from that? I have no idea, but perhaps so. And GPU miners haven't fled just yet. But they will. |
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As long as the difficulty is lower than 800 million (assuming a btc/USD price of 100$), those devices make profit.
With a break-even of what, 800 years? exactly - these devices are probably only good for mining alt coins by this point. SHA256 alt coins particularly. I guess that's the answer why anyone's buying these, but it's not a great answer. I guess, if you had an alt-coin you wanted to protect from 51% you could buy a bunch of these on the cheap and get them much faster than other ASICs. But frankly, I can't see why any alt-coin at this point doesn't adopt the Scrypt strategy, as straight SHA256 is going to leave them too vulnerable ultimately, and we've seen a bunch attacked successfully lately. |
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the growth will only be fueled by the adoption of bitcoin and businesses being opened with bitcoin, so with this said, it is a community effort to get everyone involved and be a part of the economy. We need more businesses and less speculators.
We are kindling. Eventually the spark progresses to inferno and becomes self-sustaining, grows without our active help. We have not yet reached bitcoin's tipping point. But things will happen very fast at that point. Can't say when and how, but it will be a very interesting and unforgettable series of events, the end of fiat and the ascendancy of digital currency, the last form of currency humankind will use for the rest of time. |
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As long as the difficulty is lower than 800 million (assuming a btc/USD price of 100$), those devices make profit.
With a break-even of what, 800 years? |
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If anyone can deliver it's the guys from opencores.org and theres a very strong link between them and KnCminer. I would in fact say that their normal side of there business at ORSoc
was a little slow because of the EU problems so they simply turned there attention to Bitcoin. There starting position would have been nothing like BFL and Avalon, their starting experience
could only be bettered by someone like Cadence Design Systems who have been buying up industrial IP core for some years and bought lots electronics CAD companies for the past decade.
So the next step up in hardware design would be a contracted CDS by a larger company that wanted to really make an impact or damage Bitcoin.
Lots of the major E-CAD companies used opencores as a starting based for design work. I know i worked for CDS.
But they are entering a whole new ballgame: shipping complete retail products. Designing the core is one thing, turning it into a product and managing the whole pipeline is quite another. These are two completely different businesses. They have a company making them, they have a company assembling them, what makes you think they don't have a company shipping them too? |
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They produced a working Mars FPGA based on their ASIC design at least. That proves at least chip-designing chops and the ability to code it to a working state.
Actually, you would normally develop an ASIC based on a FPGA design and not vice versa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA_prototypeYes, but there are certain pitfalls when you go to actually tape-out that takes seasoning and sophisticated simulation software to know how to avoid. BFL seems to have hit these snags considerably. If anyone can avoid them, it's an org such as Orsoc. Saying that an ASIC company "has FPGA experience" is as informative as saying that Albert Einstein knew arithmetics. There's simply NO way for an ASIC company not to know about FPGAs. That's basically my point. Just having shipped FPGAs doesn't mean BFL could make an easy transition into ASICs. You would expect an airline pilot to be able to land a single-engine airplane, but you would not necessarily expect a single-engine pilot to land an A380, roger ?
Indeed. So we'd be calling KNC true airline pilots, and BFL experienced in little more than Cessnas, whereas Avalon is somewhere in the middle to where at least they pulled off shipping. |
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Can KNCMiner really deliver 28 nanometers? most of us would even just love to know if they can deliver anything at all, even if it's 500 nm, that would make them at least legit...  They produced a working Mars FPGA based on their ASIC design at least. That proves at least chip-designing chops and the ability to code it to a working state. |
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People like to use OSRoC involvement as a reason why Kncminer is legit and going to do what they say they are. I agree they are likely making an ASIC and not a complete scam, however their promises of shipping time and power consumption seem like they'll be hard to keep.
Anyone that thinks that BFL didn't use an ASIC design company as reputable (or more reputable) than OSRoC is fooling themselves. Also, kncminer is using newer tech than BFL, which is more difficult to design and develop. Both companies are using newer tech than ASICMINER / Avalon and both companies are going to run into their share of complications. Except you just haven't seen the complications that Kncminer will run into yet because they're just getting started... they will come IMO.
Except for all of those companies, these were the first ASICs they'd ever made/ordered. Only BFL had some experience with FPGAs, and that doesn't necessarily copy directly over to ASICs. Are you sure BFL used a design company? Explain the power problems then. Any seasoned ASIC company has lots of experience avoiding the common pitfalls in producing designs the BFL apparently fell into. Orsoc by contrast, it's their business to produce these things. I agree they'll look like geniuses if they pull this off. But is it outside the realm of possibility for them to deliver? Nope. They'd just have to be extremely professional to pull this off. Are they? Seemingly they are. Now it's just a matter of waiting upon execution and seeing if they deliver. |
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Glad to see you batch-2 peeps are getting shipments. We batch-3 folks are waiting patiently |
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The difficulty will be higher after B2 completes and all of us get our B3s (~100THs). Then there are the avalon chip sales following 4 to 8 weeks from now (200THs).
Current network hash power is around 120TH/s. So.. we are looking at 2x difficulty with shipment of B2 and B3 ~ 240TH/s (Difficulty ~32M)... and then doubling again with Avalon chip sales not too long after ~480TH/s (difficulty 64M).
This is ignoring all of the competitors who won't be sitting still (like Asic Miner and bitfury).
I am hopeful that if difficulty can stay under 100M+ for 4 months, then our Batch3s can break even in 6 or 7 months. At 100M difficulty, an overclocked 4module B3 (~97GH/s) should return around .5 BTC a day.
I am not complaining... just stating facts as they have been communicated.
Using todays difficulty projections for our batch is misleading at best.
Thanks for the analysis. From that I gather that the price for a not-yet delivered Avalon batch 3 machine is dropping pretty quickly. This is doubly true for those other guys who are struggling to deliver product. The question I ponder is what is the "floor" price for a mining rig? Is it breaking even in 6 months or 2 years? The build cost of a mining rig be low enough to support a reasonable break even point? Great analysis. On top of that if we want to continue mining we need capital to keep investing in new appliances. If BTC doesn't go up and actually falls, I believe the dream will be over for a lot of miners. No one at this point should expect to live off of mining. It has to be a secondary source of income at best. Right now mining is a huge risk. We want to generate as much BTC/day as possible but so is everybody else which makes the difficulty increase faster and faster. It is self-defeating! I am investing large for my average budget and already feel a rope around my neck. J/ look the most successful asic thing: its funded and managed by its owners. we live in an era of crowfunding stuff and that project been proved its effectiveness in mining area too, and yet most of us funded the asic sellers that makes us wait so much in the dust, we became merely costumers with no rights again, the salvation became a trap. I would say asic sellers hostages while they rush to flood the market with power. we had a choice, but we were never we in this bitcoin stuff. just look at the guys cheering getting 3 units while people are still waiting for one, look at the guys cheering receiving order first than they sould receive. look at the guys rushing to sell the thing. is this protecting the network? which network? its clear now only few people cares about the project and the changes it will yet bring. only a quick profit. but thats good to see how easy are people when then face the green bill. a show of mismanagement and disrespect going on here. the sad thing it is still everyman for himself in this thing, and like this we will always sucumb to the exploiters. we should never had gave the power away. I imagine the mining "goldrush" may change a bit if BTC/USD breaks technical support on the downside for 6-12 months with the new ASIC investors selling their coins, and languishes below $20 for a while. If that happened, the best thing about it would be that the difficulty would likely drop considerably, and those of us with long-term vision, or perhaps simply gambling on bitcoin's rise, will be able to mop-up cheap coins from the disheartened. |
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