We are looking to take orders asap so we can secure enough silicon for everyone interested. It is riding off the back of one our other orders and we don't often order amounts of silicon this large. So if we miss ordering now there is some possibility we can't offer the current price again. Behind all these we have other solutions planned for the system but what gets offered and the price will depend on many things. So in summary if you want the £80/GH offer for August you have to order asap. Hard order closure will happen once we hit late July / early August manufacturing limits or in approximately 7 days whichever comes first. We will buy a certain amount of extra silicon over hard orders but that will be strictly limited by our cashflow constraints.

The we have laid down links are notionally LVDS over ribbon cable so could maybe go further than planned especially as speed doesn't have to be huge. Also because of the way have done the controller a special version could done fairly cheaply maybe add drivers for longer distances or even extra Ethernet etc. Inter-board using the Ethernet using a local hub/switch is also possible. Basically there is a lot of flexibility in the design.

Technically that would be possible but makes a bit of a mess of the concept. I would probably think you need a better specified data centre than trying to do all of that. The CM3/4 boards could be run totally independently for the cost of a controller per board and these smaller type systems will get looked at later. That is all part of our modular concept in these Goliath Miners. We are trying to keep the initial build simple and not be unachieveably ambitious like certain unmentioned companies. Our aim as always is to do what we have said that we will do. As part of that we don't want too many variations to handle until we get it all bedded down as a system.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

I would not argue with any financial analysis but on my calculations I would expect a lot faster than that. At best any ROI calculation is a very big guess. I remember a year ago a lot of people saying our CM1 would not make money and we are still making money off our own CM1 rig that we have been using as a development platform. I still expect to make money there for 1 or 2 years in Bitcoin and longer if we make the Litecoin jump. So far at least my guesses have not been too far off over the last year.

If I was to say anything having a rig sooner than later is going to be more important than the actual cost in any ROI calculation or actual profit returned. Remember we are delivering in August for CM4 and sooner for CM3 if chips appear on time.

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

We may do smaller versions but the real benefits of this is that it is designed for size. There are so many offerings in the small and middle size already we didn't want to really to drop in there in the early rigs. There is also the issue of managing builds and with the Avalon chip supply coming potentially from customers we simply need to cut down the number of people we are working with in this early phase of production. As with everything we have done so far in the bitcoin world we are aiming to maintain our indicated timelines.

Our vision for this system is that it might have different processing elements and it is kind of modular albeit on a large scale. So to be crystal clear on that we will work with other vendor silicon as much as our own offerings FPGA or ASIC. There is merit in this model as some types of board many not be available to all markets due to export restrictions. CM4 is very likely to be in the export restricted bracket and we are taking advice on that. CM3 with a very fixed function is less likely to be an issue export wise. Beyond CM3/CM4 we have other technology options in progress and being evaluated. No timeline for these before you ask but certainly not soon. It is not a secret that we have been very busy with non-bitcoin side of our business and that is expected to be the case for some months to come yet.

We have been asked what it will look like and basically the answer at the moment is a 19" rack. So not pretty but functional. We have some plans for exterior casings that will allow the unit to go into places that it could be used for water or home heating but those are far from finalised as yet and those are a secondary task. The inital units will be traditional fan driven air cooling.

Control wise some of you may have seen the dimm socket holes on the CM3 CAD picture. That is where our board/rack controllers are going to sit. Initially this will be a combo of a small FPGA and standard processor module that will allow us to run a Linux + MPBM combination but we have other options planned as well. There is an Ethernet and USB interface routed from the socket so each board potentially could run stand alone but we have also made provision to run up to 8 boards from one controller module so a master/slave type operation is possible. This approach gives some advantages in doing other technology options as we get to reuse the same controllers for new technologies.

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

CM4 does not use Avalon chips. Only CM3 uses Avalon chips.

Basically equipment of this size will be built to order and there will be a deposit so call that a preorder. The main offering will be a complete rack with air cooling and power supplies including within. Beyond this initial offering we are looking things like different sizes and maybe even bringing our Cairnsmore2 to market for the smaller customer.

On timelines we hope to have both CM3 and CM4 prototypes running in the next 2-3 weeks. A lot of work has already been done on our Cairnsmore2 development platform. The main aspect of the timeline is then just the delivery of parts and our manufacturing cycles. We have been working on those aspects for a while so August is quite practical as a delivery date.

There are 8 CM3s in this 19" rack option so it is more like 1152 Avalon chips in total between the 8 boards. So basically at the moment we are selling the rack option.

There is a big difference to a company project that has to pay wages/taxes/overheads and non-company project that does not have these costs. Even if a professional engineer or engineers do a project in their spare time it is very different to a company being available behind a project. I could give a longish list of things that won't be available from a solution engineered by even professional people in their spare time. That is in no way any smear of those projects but simple practicality and reality. Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Correct me if I am wrong (it's late) but your block erupters are costing 10 BTC ~= £653 for 1.65GH/s. = £395 per GH/s. How is that better than £80 per GH/s for a major piece of engineering?

We are not aiming to be the cheapest with this equipment as some of the supposed maybe competative offerings are way too cheap to be viable as professionally engineered and manufactured products. A rig on this scale needs a lot more engineering than a lash up design of a few chips. That said we think it is good value for this sort of rig. There are not many offerings at the 0.3-0.5 TH/s size range. This is technology that will build 100Th/s rigs and not just hang out of a laptop USB port.

A lot of you have been asking about our next generation of equipment and the purpose of this post is to introduce the way we are now going as a set of systems rather than just individual boards. We have been working on a number of technology options and have 2 of those options nearly ready to test and to offer short term for sale.

The system concept is for larger rigs typically using a 19" sub-rack to offer typically 300-500 GH/s depending on the board technology used and that is the unit size that we will initially be selling in. It isn't for small miners (sorry little guys) although we may offer something smaller later in the year for that market with a revision of Cairnsmore2 that we have been using for algorythm development. The GoliathMiner concept will over time offer a range of technologies some for Bitcoin and maybe some for Litecoin. The initial focus will be on Bitcoin.

The first technology offering isn't very original in that the base card is based on Avalon chips. The Cairnsmore3 has 144 of Avalon chips on-board. The main reason for offering this technology is purely customer demand and our ability to build units will depend on securing Avalon chips. So it will be for buyers that bring Avalon chips with them.



The second technology offering is Cairnsmore4 and this option offers more flexibility than Cairnsmore3. As well as Bitcoin we believe Litcoin is possible with this product. It has an element of FPGA technology and hence this flexibility.

The pricing model for any of these systems will be based a price of GBP £80 per GH/s. So 300 GH/s rig will be E24K. For the Avalon option there will be a cost reduction for chips supplied.

There will be a strictly limited supply for August for units based on CM4. We have enough components available to build 10 sub-racks currently. CM3 based units will be limited by Avalon chip supply and to a lesser extent ancillary parts.

If this of interest to you email us on goliath AT enterpoint.co.uk. Orders for August delivery will need to be placed rapidly to guarantee delivery dates.

There should be some format announcements probably sometime in July or August.

We have a small number of Cairnsmore1 grade-b boards available. We are selling these in BTC only at 10BTC for EU customers(inc VAT) and 8BTC for non-EU customers. These prices include shipping and VAT for EU customers. If you want any of these boards contact us on our boardsales email AT enterpoint.co.uk.

We expect to ship the last of the preorder today. If you think you have been missed now is the time to tell us. We do have some stock left that we built as contingency for grade-a yield. Most of it is grade-a and a small amount of grade-b. That stock is now open for general sales. contact us on our boardsales email if are interested.

If you are running the default bitstreams (makomk) then your you shoulf be using Icarus worker in MPBM. The Cairnsmore setting is for hashvoodoo bitstreams.

Everyone that paid a preorder deposit should have now had an email at least asking what accessories they want and we are generating final invoices as fast as our admin system will allow. If you have not had that please check your spam box and contact us if you think you have been missed.

Later today we should start asking people that are on our waiting list (asked after we closed the formal preorder for new entry) if they want to go ahead on orders and subject to the stock, and payment received, those people should get their boards shipped this week or scheduled if that has been requested.

Anyone else that is interested in a Cairnsmore1 should contact us asap. The spare stock we have is limited and whilst we can build more that will probably be back into a 4-8 week lead time.

We are a little behind on the requests for final payment so don't worry if you have not seen yours yet. We were having a good run on final assembly and testing so we kept going and didn't do as much payment admin as planned.

Despite raising the efffective grade-a test level the yield has been excellent on this batch and we have had something better than 99.9% grade-a yield. For those of you either asking for extra boards, or if you asked after the preorder closed, we should have spare boards available.