Several hundred CM1s came off the SMT assembly line today and we have started final assembly and test of those now. These are enough to cover the remaining preorders. The first of this tranch will ship this week and I expect pretty much all of the remaining preorders should be ready to ship by sometime next week. We are aiming to request final payments between now and maybe Sunday so please watch out for our email asking what accessories you want if any. Prompt response will all us to get invoices out quickly and minimise delays in get CM1s shipped to you.

There is a spread of operational performance and as far we can tell from our data the -2C grade of silicon actually works as well as -3 that some competitors used. Ironically because of what actually happens -3 silicon can actually deliver less perfomance than -2 silicon. This is what we thought would happen in this design and I think about 1 year ago I might have given out some of the reasons for that. Anyway if you don't remember that have a go at figuring that one out. It's your technical challenge for today.

Going back to the point on bitstreams it is a fact that some boards do better on Makomk and others do better on Hashvoodoo. Some boards it does not make any difference. Generally if you have a grade-b then Hashvoodoo is usually the one to be using. Grade-a there isn't such a clear choice.

Believe it or not we actually planned air draw over the rear of the boards using our stacking arrangement and a reasonable amount of heat can be taken out of the boards this way. The boards were design to allow heat to be removed partially this way. Basically it can help a bit. Heatsink bonding is not a big factor in the themal solution. It is actually a phase change material and pretty good so don't mess with that. You may break the board trying as well to remove it. It has the properties of a very strong glue once we are done the phase change here in our burn-in process.

What can be of benefit is keeping your room ambient temperature down. For most boards if the room is 40 DegC or less it doesn't make much of a difference immediately but there is the odd board that definately likes a little bit cooler. For the majority of customers they won't have any issues with that unless they live in a hot climate and don't have air conditioning. There probably are some very long term lifetime benefits of being in a cooler ambient given the Spartan-6 parts are running out of normal operational levels. Given most of last years delivery have been running ok for about 1 year I am probably talking the difference in somewhere between 5 and 50 years of operation so whether you care is something to decide.

Over 40 DegC ambient we do see more boards error more often and if you can keep below this temperature that would give you better returns. Providing it is a dry environment you can run boards in a fairly cold place if happen to live in a cold country. I would say 0 DegC as a sensible minimum ambient but a bit lower is probably ok.

It is the LEDs next to the main FPGAs (groups of 4 LEDs- red, green, ambar,blue) that I am refering to not the red LED next to the controller. The controller LED will always flash when clocks are running with controller V1.5.

The easy way to tell generically which of the 2 main bitstream options are loaded is the LEDs next to each FPGA. If the red LED continually flashes you probably have Hashvoodoo and dynamic clocking. Otherwise you probably have Makomk and fixed clocking.

The current preloaded bitstreams are Makomk200 so dynamic clocks are not supported.

We should be contacting a few people tomorrow but the main drive on this will be next week. The majority of remain preorders should be asked for final payment by the end of next week maybe with a few trailing into the beginning of the week after.

Shipping wise most should go by the middle of June assuming final payments requests are paid promptly.

We are still considering it but the time frame is very moveable. Current loading on other projects is significant and that will contine for at least a couple months and nothing will happen until we are clear of that workload.

The fan turning is a good indicator that 12V is connected.

The result going fron 200 to 210 can vary a lot from board to board assuming even that no external factors like mining pool have an effect. Some boards will give the full 5% other boards will give you almost nothing with the number of invalids rising. In some occasional cases a 210 bitstream will return less than a 200 bitstream because of the number of invalids.

Generally we are very loaded currently with the combination of a major non-bitcoin product launch (Mulldonoch3) and the on-going CM1 preorder. It's a finite resource and very stretched at the moment and will be that way for a couple more weeks until all of the preorders are all shipped. Even after that we can expect a further period of 6-8 weeks of being busy on Mulldonoch3 as we have a big program of things to do on that product before we hit the summer holiday season.

Ok on Makomk you are ok to use 210. The Makomk 220 we don't cover under warranty although many people do run that. If you do try the 220 do watch the invalid count as that is the way you know it is going wrong and likely to burn out the chips. Hashvoodoo is ok to run to 220 as it can be throttled by the mining software to protect the chips.

If you are looking at power efficiency the faster Makomk bitstreams generally have a lower power efficiency for the hashing rate returned. It is something of a thermal runaway situation which is why you have to be very careful if you go beyond the 210 version.

On input it does not make a big difference between 12V, 12.08V or 12.5V. If you are using the phenoix or jack power input there will be a small saving at 12.5V on loss in the protection diode and a very small saving in wiring loss/drop. The switching supplies will usually run from voltages as low 7V to about 16V. I wouldn't ever go any higher than 16V as some components are rated not much above that and something around the nominal 12V is the recomended value to use.

Very recent grade-a boards will have a Makomk 200 bitstream and a Controller V1.5. You should not have to touch dip switches as the last thing that is done is a mining test and it will have been set up correctly for that.

Update -We are about 1/3 of the way through the preorders now. There won't be massive numbers shipped this week but we should pick up the pace about the middle of next week with most remaining orders shipping in the first half of June.

It is a public holiday next Monday so no shipping and limited email coverage that day.

General update. Some early preorders shipped last week and that will step up a little this week. We expect our larger order of FPGAs to arrive with us late next week and that will kick off the main part of this preorder build. That should translate in larger numbers of boards shipping about the last week of May going into the first week of June so do watch out for final payment requests about then.

For those of you outside the UK it is a public holiday here on Monday. Office will be closed and limited email responses as a result.

If you are very quick then we can sneek you onto the preorder. We have not finished on component ordering so whilst that isn't complete we can handle a few more orders. Currently shipping promise is dropping to 5 weeks and may go down a little more but that has limitations in terms that once we reach a certain level of orders our stock of certain componenrts run out and we then have component lead times will force out our promise dates.

Currently we believe we are on schedule for everyone on the list. First units of this batch have now reached our burn-in test and those will start to ship out shortly. Please check your spam boxes regularly until you get the request for final payment.

Everyone that has contacted us should now have been offered a shipping promise. The assembly line is now running and the first orders should start getting dispatched in 1-2 weeks time. To make life more simple for us in May we will probably close the preorder at the end of April and anything ordered after then may have longer lead time.

Everyone should have had a response now to their preorder enquiry and if you think you have been missing do check your spam box and if nothing is there send us another email.

Preorder is open again for further orders.