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1603
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Other / Off-topic / Re: ACTUAL Butterfly Labs PCB pics!
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on: November 01, 2012, 08:13:45 PM
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11mm^2
didn't take long for Inaba to count the pixels  I counted pixels and arrived at the same conclusion: I don't see a die-size prediction. I'm going with 24mm^2
From the board pictures, the chip packages appear to my eyes to be 11x11mm. Not that that says a whole lot about the die size. |
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1604
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Other / Off-topic / Re: ACTUAL Butterfly Labs PCB pics!
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on: November 01, 2012, 06:47:48 PM
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Package size. Do I get half a bounty?
Just out of curiosity, suppose we get our boards and you guys upgrade your chips a year later. Would it be possible to just do chip swaps? Pop off the old one and insert the new, smaller, faster one? If this were intended, the chips would be socketed. |
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1605
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Other / Off-topic / Re: BFL Requests Input
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on: November 01, 2012, 03:37:13 PM
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I thought the Cairnsmore1 used 4 heatsinks, 1 fan?
It does - one heatsink per chip, all cooled by a single fan blowing air downwards onto them. Mmm, so it does. I should have looked more closely at the pics. To use a different example then, the Radeon GPUs use a single heatsink block to cool quite a few different chips, with "thermal pads" used to help insure firm surface contact and transfer of heat. |
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1606
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Bitcoin / Mining speculation / Re: Finally photos of real BFL Single SC and Jalapeno ASICs
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on: November 01, 2012, 04:20:14 AM
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No, that just means that they don't have a prototype of this board running, it does not mean they are "fakes"
A fake is something intended to fool. An engineering sample is a more likely possibility.
Engineering samples are by definition an actual, mostly-working version of the chip, possibly with various issues and really poor yields, but functional enough to test with. BFL have said they don't have any chips like that yet, so these pretty much have to be fakes (though I believe the more polite term is "mock-up"). Oh my. I can't quite believe they are ordering up 20,000 chips, and counting on them to all work right, without having first received such an engineering sample, to verify that it works, and to have the opportunity to make any changes before producing them in large numbers. If they are, well, best of luck gentlemen. |
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1607
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Other / Off-topic / Re: BFL Requests Input
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on: November 01, 2012, 03:48:46 AM
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Potentially a recipe for a manufacturing disaster.
Since there are 8 chips ALL relying on a SINGLE heatsink, a tiny variation in manufacturing could leave the chips at slightly different hights, resulting in chips that may not make contact with the bed of the heatsink, or worse!!, chips that are slightly higher and have the BGA connections compressed and fractured because they get compressed to be at the same hight as the surrounding devices.
Cairnsmore1 uses a similar design, cooling 4 chips (484-BGA I think) with a single heatsink/fan. Does it have these kind of problems? |
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1608
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com
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on: October 31, 2012, 06:56:44 PM
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I have the 860watt version of this PSU in my computer, it's "probably the best psu ever" according to anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5464/seasonic-platinum-series-860wSince I need to have my computer on to mine I will use the computers power supply to power the bASIC's of course, but I would need really long molex power cables (want to have boards around 1.5meter from computer), any ideas where they sell meter long of those or I need to make them myself? I don't know that (you could really easly do that yourself, just be sure you take great cables). A sidenote: tension decreases with the distances of the wire. So if you have a 10 meter long wire and you start at 12V, you might arrive at 11V at the other side. I would be sure that i did it right before risking to damage Xk$ of mining device. finding one will be a miracle, it is intended to be an internal connector. You should be able to get the connectors pretty easily since they have been standard in industrial and computer equipment for 40+ years. Tension=voltage? Resistance increases as you go to a smaller wire (higher gauge) as well, so be sure to keep those lines nice and fat since they will be carrying 100W DC. 100W at 12V makes for a load current of 8.333A. If you use 18 AWG copper wire, on a 1 meter run, you would see a resistive loss of about 0.349V from the wire (that counts the loss from both the positive and negative wires, 2 meters of wire total to make a complete circuit). A 2 meter run would be double the loss, etc. The connectors may also introduce some loss. Edit: If you're using 4-pin molex, and both of the negative wires are connected at both ends, the loss from the negative side would be cut in half, from using 2 wires instead of 1. So 0.262V for a 1 meter run. I base my numbers on this data: http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htmI would hope the bASIC units have nice on-board regulators that can deal with a bit of variation in the input voltage. |
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1610
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com
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on: October 31, 2012, 04:17:43 PM
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I believe that for powering the device, your can use either a wallwart-style power adapter plugged into the wall with its barrel connector, or you can use a 4-pin Molex connector from a PC power supply, like were used to power the older PATA drives.
For communication with the device, you must use USB. You cannot power the device using USB.
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1611
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Already delays in BFL shipment plans?
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on: October 31, 2012, 04:10:41 PM
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Wow they look very sleek! It's amazing there is no fan needed even considering the low power/high ghash usage.
The low power and "underclocked" nature of the jalepeno is why they don't need a fan. People are already trying to think of ways to sup it up and cool it.  I had a 16.4W FPGA miner board for a while (an X6500), and it sure needed a fan. Without airflow the passive heatsinks would get too hot to touch in a few minutes. The Jalapeno is supposed to draw 4.5W. |
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1613
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com
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on: October 31, 2012, 02:07:22 PM
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Email re-sent. Once from my mail host, and again from gmail just in case. Both will have the subject line "Re: BTCFPGA - High Efficiency Bitcoin Mining - Order 726".
I just wanted to ask if I could upgrade the order from a 27 to the 54Ghps product.
Did you pay the $1000~ or the $500~ price? It was the $599 price. I would pay the difference to upgrade. |
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1615
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Other / CPU/GPU Bitcoin mining hardware / Re: NCIPHER nFast 800 - SSL accelerator card
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on: October 31, 2012, 04:59:44 AM
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...the speed bottleneck usually becomes whatever else needs to be done over SSL (rendering a dynamic HTML page, performing a search in your mailbox, etc).
I would hope that the people who have these kinds of scaling problems already have these things separated, with the application living on one host (or cluster), and the ssl frontend (squid in accel mode or whatever) on another host (or cluster), such that they can scale each as needed, and identify with which their performance constraints lie. |
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1617
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Bitcoin / Hardware / Re: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com
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on: October 31, 2012, 04:33:02 AM
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The fact that Tom accepts phone calls is enough for me. That's why I spent most of my money on bASICs.
Having the option of calling is great, but it's not always the most efficient or convenient option (ever try saying a bitcoin address over the phone?). It would be nice if emails and forum PMs also worked consistently (I had an email from the 22nd go unanswered). I think an investment made in a customer service rep position could be a real good thing. Someone to stay on top of emails and PMs and make sure they all get answered. Plus some of us, uh, internet ppl can be a little, uh, weird about like...talking to other ppl live on the phone and stuff... |
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1619
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Other / Off-topic / Re: Already delays in BFL shipment plans?
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on: October 30, 2012, 05:34:49 PM
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<images linked from BFL forums>
Thanks, but links to the BFL-hosted images still don't work without a forum login. I'm asking if someone will download the images, upload them to imgur or somewhere, and then post those links. Edit: Nevermind, I registered myself. Here they are. |
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