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Xilinx Alveo boards, just launched, looks like they can take in a lot faster memory bandwidth. Ideal for memory hard coins.
Alveo has no more memory bandwidth than BCU1525, both have 4 DDR4 DIMMs, not sure what you're looking at. |
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---Yes, referring to the CVP order. Christian from Bittware said $5,000 max with all the bells and whistles. He actually said probably less with a large group buy.
If you got a bulk price of $5000 or less that would have been for a CVP-9, not a CVP-13. The VU13P is WAY more expensive than a VU9P. |
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The CVP-13, our long-awaited FPGA board for cryptocurrency mining is almost available to order, with expected November delivery for the first batch. Sales are through SQRL on the web (expected launch is 1PM Eastern, Aug. 30; store will show out of stock until then). Check Discord channel bittware-products for details, or see https://store.mineority.io/sqrl/cvp13/ $6000 is the liquid cooled version. |
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Some quick updates:
- The launch is still on schedule for May 30. The initial launch will be for the VCU1525 as Bittware is still working to increase the power limit of their board
- It is now time for the lucky people who already have VCU1525's to private message me, so you can receive some pre-release software in the next couple of days for initial testing and to get some feedback on how hard you find the set up process
- An attempt was made (long ago) to negotiate getting a % of hardware sales with Xilinx/Bittware but this was not successful
- The Molex acquisition was a surprise; hopefully this won't affect Bittware's participation in crypto mining
- Keccak will be launched on May 30, and Tribus will be released on June 15, followed by Phi1612/Skunkhash (which are very similar); then Lyra2z, and following that it will be either CN7 or Neoscrypt; suggestions are welcome as to desired algorithms
If you already have a VCU1525 (a real one, not AWS instance), then please message me ASAP to receive your pre-release software.
As the OP noted, we are working to make a board available with higher power than the XUPP3R. And yes, we were just acquired by Molex, but it will not have any negative affect on our participation, in fact it gives us access to more resources, including those of Nallatech, who is also a Molex company. |
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I'm wanting to try fpga mining on an AWS EC2 instance. It seems anyone that has done/is doing that is keeping the 'how to' close to their chest. BFGMiner seems to be the way to go, but where does one get the bitstream (or in the case of AWS the AFI containing the bitstream)?
After seeing posts saying someone fried an AWS F1 board with 300A, and that now there is a 150W limit but it is only a warning, I did a little searching and found that it appears AWS F1 limits your core power (Vccint) to 85W, which would be 100A at 0.85V. They say they may/will shut you down (gate your clocks) if you exceed this, see https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/afi_power.mdAlso, someone suggested that since the power supplies are current limited, you could just raise the voltage to lower the current, unfortunately this is not how these chips work. They basically take the same amount of current to do a given job, regardless of voltage. So the lower the voltage, the lower the power. This is why chip makers keep trying to run at lower and lower voltages, since it saves power. There is another power consideration in all these latest generation chips as well, which is static power (as opposed to dynamic), which is due to leakage in the transistors. While dynamic power is linear with voltage, static power (leakage) is non-linear, going up as the square of voltage. It also increases dramatically with temperature. Static power in general has nothing to do with how much work is being done, hence the name "static". Note that raising voltage may make you be able to run faster, but faster means yet more power, since dynamic power is highly dependent on clock rate. You can run certain VU9Ps at 0.72V instead of 0.85V and this will certainly lower your power BUT it also kills your performance by 20-30%. You can also run certain VU9Ps at 0.9V and get higher performance, with the associated higher power. Of course the chip vendors charge a premium for these special devices over the standard ones. So, determining the optimal combination of FPGA size, core voltage, and clock rate is not such a simple task. As mentioned, we are working with the OP on this. |
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I contacted Bittware and they are delaying the release of the crypto version of the XUPP3R.
Looks like I may have missed out.
Sorry, I've been meaning to make a post related to this. We have been working with the OP to determine the optimal configuration and board for this application, as we have a few to choose from. The XUPP3R may not be the optimal one, we have other boards, including one with larger core power supplies and even the VU13P instead of the VU9P. The OP is working to determine the combination of FPGA size, clocks, logic, memory and power use that maximizes ROI. We do not want to sell you boards that may not be the best fit, that is in no one's best interest. So you have not missed out, you perhaps have saved yourself from buying a non-optimal board (we actually have not yet taken any orders or shipped any boards to miners so no one is in that camp). You can still contact us and we will get back to you as soon as we have enough details to let you place an order. |
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Looks like Bittware reduced their standard warranty for the "crypto" models. I believe they typically have 1 yr mfg warranty on their products. Kind of disappointing the warranty was reduced that much for a $6k product.
Yes, a 90-day warranty raises a LOT of concerns. Has Bittware done stress testing and has some reason to believe the failure rate ramps up after that timeframe? I could understand a 90-day warranty on support issues with a 1-year hardware warranty. I was in the process of arranging my finances to purchase a few cards, but if the manufacturer has that little confidence in their product, they're sending me a message I can't ignore. Even the Chinese manufacturers (with their notorious quality) give 180-day warranties. Just for some background, we have been shipping this board for 1.5 years now, and have had almost no field failures. It has gone through full validation, including thermals. We manufacture in the US using a Tier 1 contract manufacturer. Our standard warranty is 1 year, we have some products with 3 year warranties, and some customers who pay for extended warranties. We also generally provide unlimited support, as our normal customer is one who buys 10s or 100s (or even 1000s) of boards. We have been building high reliability boards for decades, with one of our boards being used as part of the traction control system on the TGV (and all Alstom train and subway cars) for well over 10 years. When this mining opportunity came up, we looked for ways to provide a deep discount as we know this community is very cost sensitive. We also have concerns with the way that these boards will be used for mining, mostly from an ESD point of view. Our normal customers install these boards in servers, and are in properly controlled environments with ESD protection taken very seriously. So we lowered the warranty to reduce cost, and for fear of the boards being abused. Perhaps we went too far lowering it to 30 days. We also limited support, however, our normal support includes helping people develop their FPGA code on our board. In this case you are using code already developed. Note that we do have onboard monitoring for temperature, voltage, and current, with thresholds set to shut down the board if it appears to be entering a situation that would cause damage. We provide a utility (console and GUI versions) that you can use to talk to this onboard controller via the USB and see what is going on with all the sensors. Unlike GPUs and CPUs, FPGAs have no inherent thermal throttling, unless the FPGA developer builds that into their logic, which is very rarely done. FPGAs also burn more power as they get hotter, so from a power efficiency point of view, it is better to keep them cool. As for cost we presented, while I know it seems steep for this community, this is deeply discounted from our standard price, taking into account the reduced warranty and support. From what I can tell, Xilinx has a 90 day warranty on their devkits, which is what the VCU1525 is. I'm not sure how long they will sustain that low cost, we know of smaller board manufacturers that pay more than that for just the VU9P chip itself. Sorry for the typo "... went too far lowering it to 30 days". We've lowered it to 90 days, not 30. |
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And also what is it that we are looking at in that pic?
That’s a pair of 6xQSFP28 adapter that connects to the FPGA transceivers, with 100Gbps Direct attach cables. Aka as 6x100Gbps worth of interconnect between two more typical Virtex development boards. If you need more FPGA to FPGA connectivity, the XUPP3R also has an onboard expansion connector with 20 transceivers, and a standard cable that can connect two boards together. So 4x 100Gbps QSFPs on the front, and another 5x 100Gbps on an expansion connector. That means you could daisy chain with 400Gbps FPGA to FPGA. |
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Note that we do have onboard monitoring for temperature, voltage, and current, with thresholds set to shut down the board if it appears to be entering a situation that would cause damage. We provide a utility (console and GUI versions) that you can use to talk to this onboard controller via the USB and see what is going on with all the sensors. Unlike GPUs and CPUs, FPGAs have no inherent thermal throttling, unless the FPGA developer builds that into their logic, which is very rarely done. FPGAs also burn more power as they get hotter, so from a power efficiency point of view, it is better to keep them cool.
@BittWareFPGATech The OP stated that you will be mining with your own boards. Can you vouch for these hash rates presented by the OP? We have not yet done any mining, and for the record, have no big plans for this. We have joked internally that perhaps we should use mining as the factory burn in test for our boards. The OP has offered to get us the code once released, and we may play around a little to understand the thermals, etc. |
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Looks like Bittware reduced their standard warranty for the "crypto" models. I believe they typically have 1 yr mfg warranty on their products. Kind of disappointing the warranty was reduced that much for a $6k product.
Yes, a 90-day warranty raises a LOT of concerns. Has Bittware done stress testing and has some reason to believe the failure rate ramps up after that timeframe? I could understand a 90-day warranty on support issues with a 1-year hardware warranty. I was in the process of arranging my finances to purchase a few cards, but if the manufacturer has that little confidence in their product, they're sending me a message I can't ignore. Even the Chinese manufacturers (with their notorious quality) give 180-day warranties. Just for some background, we have been shipping this board for 1.5 years now, and have had almost no field failures. It has gone through full validation, including thermals. We manufacture in the US using a Tier 1 contract manufacturer. Our standard warranty is 1 year, we have some products with 3 year warranties, and some customers who pay for extended warranties. We also generally provide unlimited support, as our normal customer is one who buys 10s or 100s (or even 1000s) of boards. We have been building high reliability boards for decades, with one of our boards being used as part of the traction control system on the TGV (and all Alstom train and subway cars) for well over 10 years. When this mining opportunity came up, we looked for ways to provide a deep discount as we know this community is very cost sensitive. We also have concerns with the way that these boards will be used for mining, mostly from an ESD point of view. Our normal customers install these boards in servers, and are in properly controlled environments with ESD protection taken very seriously. So we lowered the warranty to reduce cost, and for fear of the boards being abused. Perhaps we went too far lowering it to 30 days. We also limited support, however, our normal support includes helping people develop their FPGA code on our board. In this case you are using code already developed. Note that we do have onboard monitoring for temperature, voltage, and current, with thresholds set to shut down the board if it appears to be entering a situation that would cause damage. We provide a utility (console and GUI versions) that you can use to talk to this onboard controller via the USB and see what is going on with all the sensors. Unlike GPUs and CPUs, FPGAs have no inherent thermal throttling, unless the FPGA developer builds that into their logic, which is very rarely done. FPGAs also burn more power as they get hotter, so from a power efficiency point of view, it is better to keep them cool. As for cost we presented, while I know it seems steep for this community, this is deeply discounted from our standard price, taking into account the reduced warranty and support. From what I can tell, Xilinx has a 90 day warranty on their devkits, which is what the VCU1525 is. I'm not sure how long they will sustain that low cost, we know of smaller board manufacturers that pay more than that for just the VU9P chip itself. |
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