There were originally 2 runs planned pre Mars and Jupiter; one for 500 pre-order, one for 500 proven.

Then Mars and Jupiter were announced. So not to piss-off those that had already expressed interest, they were still held as the initial interested parties, and their order numbers respected.

Those that choose to purchase Mars are guaranteed first run placement in Juliter. Subsequent to that it follows the original order numbers pertaining to when they initially registered interest.

They explained this process clearly each step.

There is risk, they need to produce a working mask for a 28nm ASIC and then manufacture the mining rigs en mass, overclock them to meet the specified hashrate (as they technically are 250gh/s worth of 28nm chips clocked to 350gh/s) and deliver them running stable by September as stated.

in any case Jupiter and Saturn need to arrive before the hashrate goes ballistic with 760,000 Avalon chips adding >215 TH, not to mention ASICminer and BTCGarden adding between 100-200 TH and BFL possibly adding a significant amount and limiting any chance of ROI in a reasonable time...

He's crying about being another 'late to the party', that wants to 'throw money at it'.

What KNC has done has given people time to perform due diligence at no cost to themselves, by taking the time to inform themselves whilst they prepared their evidence and proof of concept. This allowed those interested that can't just 'throw money at things' to save up so the network can be fairly distributed to those paying attention and decentralised from 'money throwers'. The entire point of Bitcoin.

BTW the FPGA is not overpriced. FPGAs cost more than ASICs. Considerably more, but they allow you to refine the design as they are programmable. The final design is basically then produced as an ASIC, which is cheaper to produce, but has a greater initial non recurring engineering cost. From then on in it's chips for pennies or a handful of dollars each.

I think even under the worst case scenario (baring bitcoin crash) the machine will pay for itself within a month. Given that even a difficulty well over 1,000,000,000 would still be profitable...

The problem is there are no higher current regs. That was the highest I could find at 16A, and I didn't want to start playing with ganged up regs. An alternate choice was putting 4 regs per board at 12A each, or going controller + discrete like on the Avalon, but other than the ASIC they are the most costly part. Well, not counting the heat sink either.

With a GPU you are downvolting that which has little effect on performance.
There's no similarity here.
(or you could compare it to scrypt mining where that downvolting has a clear negative effect)

questions, comments, concerns?

Fair enough I thought it was about Avalon in general. Yes at this point in time, there is much more to be made mining than selling unless you can get tens of thousands for it.

I'm reviewing the newest "Klondike" PCB schematics from BkkCoins today. He has agreed to let us license the boards for $2-3 per board, I'm guessing $2 for the 16-chip boards and $3 for the 64-chip boards would be fair, I'm sure he wouldn't mind a tip also for his hard work on designing these new PCBs.

I'll be ordering a couple 16-chip boards and a 64-chip board for my own needs from an assembler in California, getting them ready before the chips arrive. If you guys are interested, I can start a group thread for PCBs from the California assembler.

I hope RagingAzn can chime in here also. It would be great to get some of our "sample" chips onto a test board as soon as they arrive in the States. Cheers, all.

Who should I talk to about getting the spreadsheet changed/my name put on it?

How about decentralizing the hashpower by selling part of your chips and rigs? I cannot trust in these kind of huge mining farms business model.
Also, model A sounds good even though you're not bulletproof against natural disasters. You could spread your ASICs in multiple locations all around China or you could sell part of them to your worldwide investors while securing the 100T power.

There will be enough people selling the chips once they arrive, I don't see any reason anybody would pay a premium for a pre-order before it has even shipped. There's nothing to indicate that there will be much delay between, say, first order placed, and 5th order placed. Once the wafers are made and packaged, they'll all probably ship within a very short time of each other. This isn't like BFL where there's going to be months of extra wait time for every week you are back in the queue.

..

I am an EE with access to a lot of nice test equipment and plan on having my Klondike-16 boards assembled by a local professional PCB Assembly (P&P + Reflow with Pb63Sn37 solder) company I've worked with and can get boards made very fast.  I'd like to get one or two of the sample chips to test and publish for everyone's knowledge the results of these tests before the full batches ship in July:

* The Klondike-16 design as-is (P&P files, Solder Paste locations -- especially the QFN pad, Solder paste stencil thickness, etc) as populated by an outsourced assembly house
* The standard functionality of the boards (with a single chip, my understanding is the design will work with any number of chips, might need to tweak the firmware).  Hash rate, power draw.  Power draw of ASIC at various clock and hash rates.
* Thermal analysis of the board.  With various heatsink, without a heatsink, with various heatsinks with poor mechanical connection (I'll watch the temp closely so it doesn't overheat and damage the chip), with and without forced airflow.
* Overclocking.  I can modify the design, change out clock sources, modify the settings on the PLL on the chip(s).  Am very curious to see what these chips are capable of with proper cooling.  I would not be surprised to see 20, maybe 30%+ better performance.  I do not think the current 282MH/sec is a thermal limit, but I can't know for sure until i can play with it.  Similar to thermal analysis, I'll keep the chip within acceptable operating range.  I don't want to blow anything up until we have a lot more information.  Especially with only the one chip.
* Affects of the above on the power requirements (increased current on the 1.2V line, perhaps above 2A/chip.  Possibly need for additional decoupling capacitance on the chips.  Oscope measurements, Spectrum analyzer (depending on if there is harmonics or noise coupling onto the Vcc plane(s)).
* After the above, some modifications to the design to support overclocking.  -- While at this time I believe there is a good amount of headroom on these chips, the current design, both Avalon's official reference and Klondikes, provides exactly the max current spec for the chips (i.e. 32A @ 1.2V for 16 chips, each rated for 2A max.)  I expect that OC'ing will push this beyond, something i'll confirm with power/current measurements when OC'ing.  (Will report Clock freq, Hash rate, Current draw, Temperature, Heatsinking methods used, etc.)


If i happen to get more than 1 (i have some chips in other orders), I will probably have multiple PCB assemblies built up, each with 1 chip.  This will help to verify a tiny bit better the yields of the assembly, which in theory should be very high.  But there would be nothing worse than suddenly realizing that 50% of the boards are scrap.  If i get say, 4, i will have 2x boards with 1 chip and 1x board with 2 chips made.

Of course we want to check to make sure that a board with say, 16x chips works of course. But i expect that BkkCoins will be getting several dozen chips from various people, so he should be able to take care of that.