Latest posts of: Bogart

Has *anyone* received a refund since the 08-Jan "new Chinese year year" post?

I know CC refunds might not happen that fast, but BTC refunds should. At least one.

Quote from: RHA on January 10, 2013, 12:13:25 PM

Quote from: Bogart on January 09, 2013, 04:08:28 PM

However, for an entity with the financial wherewithal to ride out all the cancelations, if they can manage to complete development of the product and ship even a small handful of orders, once that happens, securing a massive flood of orders will not be a problem IMO.

If they can manage to complete development of the product, they can set all unsold devices to mine for them, earning even more than selling them.

I disagree. I think there's more money to be made in selling the devices, by far.

Quote from: Frizz23 on January 09, 2013, 01:10:30 PM

But you can have a test wafer (with a couple hundred chips, depending on die size) that's processed with another batch (so 49 wafers of product A and 1 wafer with my test chips).

Almost.

It's more like 50 identical wafers, with a tiny area of each for your project, and the rest of the area of each for other projects.

I understand that BFL did not go this route, and went straight to full wafer production, first for the batch that had a "refraction issue", and then again with the "bullet run" that turned out to need "clock buffer adjustments". I understand that the third batch, now in production, comes to 100k chips or more.

I imagine they've blown through at least a million bux at this point in masksets alone.

Quote from: repentance on January 09, 2013, 04:40:46 AM

Quote from: Bogart on January 09, 2013, 04:11:24 AM

I don't get it. Is the quote from a movie or something?

No, it's funny because Tom appears to have been emphasising the fact that the new "benefactors" are ASIAN in order to reassure people that they will be able to ensure that the bASICs will actually get built and shipped in March.

Oh, yeah that is pretty funny. Cheesy

Quote from: repentance on January 09, 2013, 06:02:59 AM

Quote from: Bogart on January 09, 2013, 05:45:46 AM

I'm thinking ASICMINER.

Sure, they have their own chips, but it will take over 200 of their chips to make a 72Gh/s device, but only 16 bASIC chips.

Plus if they haven't pulled the trigger on a full wafer maskset yet for high volume production of their own 130nm design, they could just save all that cost and instead buy the half finished 90nm bASIC chips, assuming they trust them to work.

Tom mentioned much earlier reaching an agreement to supply chips to a competitor. I think these are the same ppl who are now acquiring bASIC.

Nobody seems to know whether there even are any half finished 90 nm bASIC chips.

We don't know, but maybe they do.

Quote from: Bogart on January 09, 2013, 05:45:46 AM

Taking over bASIC would be a massive risk right now as a lot of people are wanting refunds on their pre-orders and it will likely require an injection of more capital to finish development of the bASIC units. Whoever takes over isn't even guaranteed those first batch sales because they can't predict how many people will cancel their orders.

In the short term, yes.

However, for an entity with the financial wherewithal to ride out all the cancelations, if they can manage to complete development of the product and ship even a small handful of orders, once that happens, securing a massive flood of orders will not be a problem IMO.

The real risk is in whether the chips work, if they have even been produced.

Quote from: repentance on January 08, 2013, 09:23:25 PM

Quote from: greyhawk on January 08, 2013, 09:10:19 PM

Do not worry. These ASIAN benefactors will not let anyone down.

EDIT: No seriously. This is hilarious.

ASIAN benefactors.

This is priceless.

I don't get it. Is the quote from a movie or something?

Quote from: Phinnaeus Gage on January 08, 2013, 02:16:30 AM

I would be very disappointed if we later learn that all the ASIC developers are in cohorts.

Really? I'd think you'd be delighted.

BTW, it's 'cahoots'.

Quote from: Phinnaeus Gage on January 07, 2013, 12:00:06 PM

Fuckin' WOW!

Yup, it looks pretty grim.

One question in my mind is: How did Tom ever manage to have success producing the MMQ product? Was there someone else actually overseeing product development, and he just sells them?

Not knowing when CNY occurs, *and* not bothering to find out before making a product announcement regarding it surely deserves a facepalm if ever anything did.

Quote from: repentance on January 05, 2013, 09:12:02 PM

Quote from: Bogart on January 05, 2013, 06:53:00 PM

Presumably that means they have now given the go-ahead to make of a new maskset for full-wafer production, in order to reach their planned 50TH/s capacity.

If these ASIC vendors don't get their production moving along quickly, we may see a significant (> 50%) consolidation of network hashing power.

Whether it's abused or not, the mere potential will undermine confidence in the security of the network and the currency it supports, IMO.

From memory, they way they did this run was to fully complete half the chips in the batch - so there's already a similar amount of chips which is half-way through production and which now only need the second half of layers added (because they know the first lot worked they don't need to make any changes to the process).

Yeah, the first half of the first batch is supposed to sum up to 6Th/s, with the second half being another 6TH/s.

After that it's on to full wafer production to scale up to 50Th/s (or beyond), which I'm speculating has already been set into motion. I would at this point if I were them.

Quote from: friedcat on August 09, 2012, 08:17:17 AM

Self-Mining with First Batch of Chips At least 12TH/s in
total
...
Self-Mining after Mass Production Unlimited hashrate in
theory because of the low margin cost. But in reality we have to consider the
cost of management (labor) and place (rent). We believe an expansion to 50TH/s
is not hard to achieve.

Quote from: greyhawk on January 03, 2013, 12:37:16 PM

Just gonna drop this here:

Quote from: friedcat on January 03, 2013, 06:31:33 AM

Update

The samples passed all functionality tests. The power consumption is also within the expected range. And as our overclocking tests had shown, they still have a lot of potentials compared to our original spec. This means that the biggest risk of our project is gone and our NRE is a fruitful spend.

The first production batch of chips will be out of the packaging service tomorrow. Our deploying is on its way.

Quote from: abeaulieu on January 05, 2013, 04:17:52 PM

Quote from: fcmatt on January 04, 2013, 01:21:00 AM

Quote from: creativex on January 03, 2013, 04:01:34 PM

BTCFPGA also claims to have a functioning chip at this time and Avalon must either have them or be very close if they expect to meet their countdown date.

I have a chip also. Called a gpu. Custom designed by my company. U might have heard of them. Ati. Yeaaa bitches and it is mining right now.

Sounds like a gpu to me, not an ASIC.

It's an ASIC for Graphics Processing.

One might argue that it's being used for a purpose outside of its Specified Application.

Quote from: fcmatt on January 04, 2013, 01:59:08 AM

Quote from: nathanrees19 on January 04, 2013, 01:41:18 AM

Quote from: PuertoLibre on January 03, 2013, 07:12:50 PM

You went from racial profiling to calling a customer a "fucking idiot" twice in less than 5 posts. (I am guessing it is five, might be less than that).

To be fair, talking about something being a problem in a particular country is more referring to the laws and culture of that country, and really does have very little to do with race. It has not yet been shown that he specifically targeted a race. It is a simple fact that a person's views of "right" and "wrong" are shaped heavily by the environment they grow up in, which indeed varies between countries, but he didn't even say that people raised in China may be more likely to violate the GPL (which may very well be true), he just made the point about it being difficult to (legally) do anything about such violations.

If you want a recent example: http://www.forum.lepanlife.com/showthread.php?tid=774

So really no diff then the usa 100-200 years ago. We used to copy books and resell them here in the usa with no profits going to england. Many other examples. Eventually you have to change your behavior if you do not want the same things to happen to you by the next up and coming poor country with laws going unenforced or no laws at all.

Eventually it irons itself out.

Even Hollywood was created by IP outlaws:

http://www.cobbles.com/simpp_archive/edison_trust.htm

And look at them now.

"The slave becomes the oppressor when the master dies."

Quote from: gopher on January 02, 2013, 07:08:08 AM

one can pre-order ASIC based mining equipment today, or wait for 6 months and order it then - in both cases, the ROI will be in the similar range

That is almost certainly not true.

Unless you expect no ASIC miners to ship ever. Then it would be true.

Quote from: gmaxwell on January 02, 2013, 12:01:53 PM

Other than avoiding providing source to the general public before the device's actual realize I can't imagine the avalon team having _any_ motivation to release a binary only miner

A binary release will need to be shipped in the Avalon device itself (compiled to run on Atheros MIPS), if it's to be ready to operate out-of-the-box.

I trust that they will release the source also. I believe they have commented saying that they will.

Quote from: repentance on January 02, 2013, 01:26:19 AM

Josh has already said that anything which was sourced from places which would be affected by CNY they already have in hand. He seems confident that the fab itself won't be affected by the holiday but that might be naivete on his part as even businesses which don't officially close often still have extremely reduced capacity as many workers head home for the holidays (with or without permission) and many employment contracts end around that time of year.

It could also mean a higher workload (and more contention) for the fab, if it's still operating while the others are closed.

Quote from: repentance on January 02, 2013, 01:26:19 AM

I seriously doubt their ability to ship in January if they don't have the packaged chips in hand within the next 10 days because, as Josh is so fond of pointing out in respect of his competitors, there's still a lot which can go wrong after the foundry finishes producing the chips.

Even when they have the packaged chips in hand, the multi-million dollar question is still whether they'll work acceptably well or not.

#0: The chips got wet and rusted away in Inaba's backpack while he was transporting them back from the top secret foundry run by monks high up in the mountains of Tibet.

Quote from: 2112 on December 31, 2012, 06:34:13 PM

Wouldn't it be practical to keep all PCB layers clean under the ground paddles; use a hole punch to cut out the PCB epoxy under the chips and mount the real heatsink on the bottoms with copper washers/thermal spreaders? The tops would then just need a mechanical clamp.

Instead of cutting the PCB, place large exposed solder pads on both sides of the board, connected by lots of vias. Then just mount the heatsink to the exposed pads on the underside, while the thermal interface on the bottoms of the QFN packages get soldered to the connected pads on the top side.

Quote from: stan.distortion on December 30, 2012, 10:46:05 AM

Just a thought on cooling, if they're laid out in squares of 9 or 16 chips then off the shelf CPU coolers could be used.

Only if thermal pads are used. Otherwise, the height and angle of the chip package surfaces is not likely to be uniform enough to ensure good thermal coupling with all of them.

Quote from: DiabloD3 on December 29, 2012, 11:26:18 PM

Quote from: mrb on December 29, 2012, 10:41:36 PM

Quote from: dunand on December 29, 2012, 06:18:46 PM

Quote from: aTg on December 28, 2012, 06:14:06 PM

It would be possible to know which is the manufacturing cost of a single integrated?

+1

How does it cost to produce an ASIC chip once the design is all done?

In the case of Avalon: $4000-5000 per wafer, 4055 chips per wafer, $1/chip: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=120184.msg1402474#msg1402474

Hrm, if they're aiming for 66gh per unit, and each chip does 0.75gh, its approximately 88 chips per unit. Packaging and testing cost is, what, another 50 cents per? And completing the product (PCB manuf, mounting components on PCB, etc) is another, say, ~$120 per unit? Thats only a 5x markup from the sales price, how are they staying in business? =/

As you may recall, the $1,299 price was only meant to be for the first batch, and was to be $1,999 thereafter. Only after the competition threw down did Avalon make the $1,299 price permanent.