Well researchers have produced transistors as small as 2.5nm using techniques that look compatible with current bleeding-edge 7nm processes. Smallest 3d transistors yet

Now given the current downturn in the market I do not see these showing up in miners anytime soon, hell, 7nm miners are just out and sales are - meh, but still... Thoughts?

[A LOT]

Just got a s9 batch-17 and... Bitmain has changed the firmware.
I will post in detail tomorrow but for a summary of changes:

• They have changed the board channels used and so the temp reporting channels. Now using channels 6, 7, and 8.
• Looks like changing the frequency may be gone. There is no longer a GUI option to change it. On startup, the firmware goes through several checks per-board and sets the best freq and possibly Vcore as well per-board. When all is done, the boards report different frequencies. This could turn out to be rather -- interesting.
• Looking at the Kernel Log it shows several lists of freq and voltage it tries for each board. A note at the beginning of each list says that freq is now stored in the PIC. Now does that mean that a warm boot bypasses the testing -- dunna know but hope so.

I'll post the Kernel Log tomorrow. Also fan speed no longer has a setting on the BMminer GUI. Log says is set as needed starting at 40% Oh, the fans are on different channels as well. Think fans are now reported in position 6 an 8. I'll verify tomorrow. edit: Fans in positions 3 and 6

Due to the time it takes for the new booting process -- around 4 min or more -- better set dead miner/offline/etc monitoring to wait at least that 4 maybe even 5 min before trying to issue another reboot call to the miner...

Frankly, during the setup process for miner name and pool assignments the reboots needed were taking so long that I thought the miner was going to be a DOA!   Folks, keep in mind that much longer time needed to come to life before you start to get miffed/worried like I was. A couple times when it was taking A LOT longer than was normal with the earlier batches I forced reboots trying to get the miner to respond. thankfully it didn't brick.

This started about 15 min ago, around 6:55p Eastern
Note card-3 (chain 4)


After a soft boot STILL card 3!


WHAT in the HELL???

Has anyone paid attention to the power input area of the s9 hash boards? This detail I took from the pic of of the s9  board posted in the ad for it shows:


In the lower-left, doesn't that look suspiciously like a programming port for a voltage controller? The switching FET's are there under the heatsink (nice touch!) as well as a honking big inductor so I have to assume that the s9 does use a buck regulator.

Hmm. Curious minds have to wonder what might be done with that...