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I joined here 3 months ago with a bee in my bonnet about overpriced block erupters, which were 2 BTC at the time. Told everybody that would listen (and quite a few who wouldn't) thay they were overpriced and would never make back the investment (with links to calculators). They are less than 0.5 BTC now, and still overpriced for the ROI expected. In another couple of months the ROI will be less than the manufacturing cost (I've seen $7 quoted as marginal cost of manufacture). Then what?
So, no, not worth buying an erupter, or any of the pre-order asic miners. Its a classic Californian Gold Rush. There is no money to be made as everyone is chasing the same return (3600BTC/day), and fools are piling in to buy the "shovels".
[/rant off] glad to be of service.
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It's not common to skip this chip level test (like it's claimed that KnC does) and let the customer or some 3rd party test the chip using some expensive fixture or run tests on actual PCB for the purpose of testing the chip (of course you run a lot of test on the PCB to detect bad solder joints and other assembly problems).
Give it a rest. You're blowing this up completely out of proportion from a throwaway remark made at an open day months ago. As I said earlier, testing is what the semiconductor industry does. Yes, this can be skipped for the very first samples off the production line, but its not the norm for production parts and won't be the norm with KNC either. Not sure what your point about customer or 3rd party testing is about ... chip packaging and final test is subcontracted, the test equipment is already there. You may need a custom socket/interface card built, but there are also standard fixtures for all the common packages, which will be perfectly adequate for the majority of devices. |
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Um, yeah I agree that it's not a problem. That's what I said. Did you get me confused with the other guy?
Yeah, sorry, kingcoin was doing the concern trolling, but you did back him up with some of your comments there ... I don't really see the point of testing without the PCB
Testing is what the semiconductor industry does. The cowboy days are long over (I hope, being out of the biz for two decades). |
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The actual numbers are lower, and the ~0.6W/GH was number we decided that was closest to reality + error margin.
Was that in the board meeting where you decided to overlook all those nasty complicated calculations and instead chose the numbers that fitted the maximum TDP of the PCI-E card you had in mind from your marketing guys? |
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Regarding power consumption, Radeon 5970 and 5870 both consume more power than our card does, the very reason we took this design approach.
Yeah, but what about when the power doubles from your pre-fab estimates, like every other chip you've built? |
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And, it would be much simpler to test the PCB then to test the chip. The chip itself has a 1mm ball pitch and thousands of balls. Aligning it might take time, and it will generate a lot of heat in the tester (I guess you could test one engine at a time, though)
(although I'm sure the low chip yeild would suck)
You do realise that the very same foundries making KNC's chips make other chips too? This is not rocket science (actually its far more high tech than that, but...), the industry is what 50 years old now? These problems were solved years ago (if BGA was untestable, it would never have made mainstream). Just stop it please. The problem does not exist, people are doing this every day. |
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BFL's page about the monarch is so delirious it seems a fake.
Um, but, like don't you have any advertising standards laws in the States? Its not just delirious, its a catalogue of lies and false promises  Breathe! This is BFL, should expect it from them I suppose. I agree, its quite some entertainment. I've just about quit watching reality TV since I joined here. This is quality time, right here, for free  |
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Why, oh why, when reading this thread do I keep thinking of the film primer? Probably all those garages filled with weird tech, with intense groups of nerds huddled around, comparing .... sizes. Don't mind me, I liked the film, if you're reading this you probably will too (honest, I don't get any kickback from promoting it  ) |
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So how do all the manufacturers of CPU, GPU, FPGA and all the other high power devices manage then? Of course the test fixtures are expensive, have a long lead time, and need specific expertise to program (my first job, 30 years back was writing test patterns a TekTest for the 5 micron ULA devices that were just coming onto the market). ORSoc will have outsourced this to the experts (one hopes).
Basically the way I have described it: scan insertion, automatic test pattern generation and analysis, and probably some built in self test. And I think you missed my point with your selective quoting. Go back to the original post. You asked ... BGA fixtures are expensive and not always so easy to deal with. It not impossible even though the package here is probably not the cheapest one around. But why?
To which I replied as above. What has that got to do with ATPG etc etc? The question was about how you physically handle a BGA packaged device in a tester, and I (slightly rhetotically) replied that you do it the exactly same way as CPU/GPU/FPGA devices are currently done! Enough with the concern trolling, ORSoc know what they are doing (probably more than BFL, Avalon and the rest). They may or may not have decided to omit the packaged device test. Beyond the initial prototypes they will certainly need to have one in place, so unless there are problems with lead times on the test adapter/programming, they will almost certainly package test the prototypes too. |
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He could have squeezed six block eruptors and a hub into a case and bolted on a fan. Difficult to estimate its size from the (lack) of detail on the listing. No previous history of selling block eruptors either (just some heatsinks and pretty cases  ). It does look scammy, someone with an apparently A* 100% ebay seller's record goes rogue. I just don't trust ebay's feedback. All sorts of ways to game it. |
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Another way to put it - if a Hasher has errors, and those errors are undetectable, then those errors don't matter. The system will mine away without any problems.
Although I did think of something - suppose a hasher had an error that caused it to miscount the number of trailing zeros, but only if they were above a certain threshold. in that case your miner would appear to be working working just fine - but it would be ignoring hashes above a certain difficulty.
It would mean that, if that difficulty were reached, everything would appear to be working perfectly and in fact you'd be getting full credit at a mining pool, but you would never find a block and the effect would be slightly reduced luck for the pool.
But that said, they're likely including known high diff block headers in their tests.
I don't think that's an issue. The pool will check the submitted share and reject it if the hash is invalid for the worker difficulty level (target). For that matter cgminer et all will reject it as a hardware error before it even reaches the pool. The issue of the miner mis-calculating the hash against the target just means it will fail to report a valid hash, ie just another duff core fault. I'm not sure about current ASICs, but the original fpgaminer (and ngzhang's icarus and the ztex's) all work to a target of 00000000 (difficulty one). It would make sense for next-gen asics to accept a variable target to reduce the comms bandwidth to cgminer, but that requires a driver coding change. I guess cklovas or kano could confirm this. [EDIT] Having thought about it, you are correct. If a hasher is incapable of reporting a high difficulty share, but OK for difficulty 1 shares. then it will act as a leecher, submitting valid shares but never solving a block. Its a pretty unlikely failure mode though, though could be designed-in at the development stage (evil grin  ). That's the trouble with proprietary systems, no knowledge of exactly what is going on inside the black box (cue conspiracy theorists  ) |
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Hi, I'm new to the community. Can someone explain what are orphaned blocks? Do we get payment for those?
Others have more expertise than me, but I'll give it a quick stab ... Orphaned blocks occur when a block is solved (the found hash is less than the current target, or to put it another way the found hash difficulty is higher than the bitcoin network difficulty), but by two different miners within a small space of time. So now there are two blocks that could be added to the blockchain and the network must decide which to use (it can't just take the first as its a distributed system, no-one is in"charge"). So different parts of the network will add one or other of the blocks at random to their local copy of the blockchain and continue solving the next block. Once the next block is found, this chain is longer and is broadcast, at which point all the miners hashing off the other block give up, the block is deleted from the chain and becomes an orphan. Chains can be rearranged even later, hence the 6 confirmations needed for a transaction (once the chain is 5 blocks longer than the block with the transaction it is considered very unlikely to become an orphan). As for payment, it depends on the pool. The pool (or a solo miner) is not paid for the orphan as the 25btc block free coin generation transaction simply ceases to exist on the blockchain. However a PPS pool will usually pay shares on the orphaned block (this is why their fee is higher, the pool carries the risk of the loss). Other payment systems may not pay out on orphans. |
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I'll probably get out of my depth here and show my ignorance, but WTF, its a quiet day so ... Running scan insertion and inserting signature analysis on the hash core will require adding gates. More than what can be handled by a simple metal fix. Hence it would require a number of masks being produced at a high cost and more time and resources. But why?
But (as has been pointed out upthread), this is totally unneccessary as its already built in - a bitcoin hasher is almost the ultimate in a self-testing design. Probably better than most of the self test bolted onto typical commodity ASICs. BGA fixtures are expensive and not always so easy to deal with. It not impossible even though the package here is probably not the cheapest one around. But why?
So how do all the manufacturers of CPU, GPU, FPGA and all the other high power devices manage then? Of course the test fixtures are expensive, have a long lead time, and need specific expertise to program (my first job, 30 years back was writing test patterns a TekTest for the 5 micron ULA devices that were just coming onto the market). ORSoc will have outsourced this to the experts (one hopes). |
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Oh poo. The thread went chip-design while I was asleep. I missed all the fun  I'll just point out that KNC have had plenty of time since tape-out to refine their testing procedures. Yes is is insane to omit the wafer test on production devices, but these are prototypes (for all they say about commercial product, it will take many more months to shakedown a volume-scale design, and quite right too, time is very much of the essence with bitcoin mining). Provided they have sorted out a test socket/interface for the packaged chips, so they can weed out the DOAs (dead shorts between power rails do not make it onto PCB's), and (rare) controller failures, they will be fine. |
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What's the point of showing us the case when you don't have the chips. Is like showing us the egg without the chicken. You cannot have an egg without the chicken laying/produce an egg. Show us the Chip Please.
Darwin might have something to say about that. But why am I talking to a bot anyway? (HMMM, evolution in software, perhaps I'm contributing to the advancement of our AI overlords ...) |
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Oh no. Not another SCAM site. I suppose we should expect to see more and more of these now.
Even if its real (which is isn't), these are first-gen chips (you're fooling no-one by quoting twice hashrate of the avalon chips for the same power), so you're too late to this market anyway.
Go away!
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No feedback to report
all I can tell you is be very careful. There are many people trying to break in to your wallets and you will get no help. Be very very careful, change your password regularly, never write it down and keep wallet backups.
I beg to disagree with this. Choose a strong password, do write it down and store it in your safe/bury it in your garden/wherever. You are far more at risk of forgetting a strong password than someone guessing it (and if its a weak password, changing it every Tuesday is not going to help at all). But yes, backup your wallet, everywhere. If the password is strong enough then its safe even if some cracker gets his hands on it. And if you're paranoid use cold storage (paper wallets), and keep multiple copies of them too. |
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"Stale" shares are due to a block (a real one, not a share) being found on the network in the time between your miner starting a piece of work and submitting the share. They are pretty rare these days if you are mining with the statum protocol (the norm), but on the older getwork protocol it was a significant problem. Other possible reasons include hardware errors (wrong hash), but these are trapped by the mining software (eg cgminer) so should not be submitted to the pool.
Then again, if you really meant block (as in solo mining), in this case you are mining at the network difficulty and bitcoind is acting like your private "pool", so a reject here will again be due to another block being found on the network, invalidating your work. Orphaned blocks are another matter, but you won't see these rejected by bitcoind, they just result in you missing out on your 25btc because the network decided that your block was in the shorter chain, sorry that's just how the protocol works, win some, lose some.
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It won't last, but I'm glad I did this while everyone was focused on the ASIC race (I also ordered a 162Gh/s that won't make ROI most likely once it arrives). I also had a heck of a time with heat, but thanks to many hydroponics websites, they had a lot of information on cooling spaces. Those fans I installed with intake/exhaust, saved me about 6 tons of cooling. And after late september, the space will be under 80 degrees until May with just outside air being pumped in and hot air being exhausted.
If we did something like that in the UK, we'd likely get raided by the old bill looking for a cannabis farm (they even use heat seeking cameras on helicopters to hunt down the hot spots in attics etc). |
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