Doing bitcoin in FPGAs is pointless at this point. Believe me I did financial modeling for Altera Cyclone V and Stratix V, Xilinx Kintex-7, Achronix Speedster22i HD
1. Time it takes to optimize for new FPGA is some amount of work. Not off the shelf kind of thing.
2. You can't get any decent quantity of FPGAs for 4+ month from when you order.
3. While I can get FPGAs at a lowest price of anyone (quotes up to 100,000 units), cost is still $100-200MH
4. FPGAs are not designed to work that hard and you will almost always will run into thermal limit before you use all the logic.
5. With current difficulty and new ASICs around the corner you will get about $60/GH returned while spending $200/GH around day 80-90 and then your cost of power will be more than it makes.
Bottom line is it's too risky to continue to do bitcoing projects on FPGAs for profit.
Other virtual currencies may be worth it.
Good luck on alter currencies, if you need cheap FPGA source let me know.
1. Time it takes to optimize for new FPGA is some amount of work. Not off the shelf kind of thing.
Ans. Agree, it's going to be a learning experience for me and several other interested members.
2. You can't get any decent quantity of FPGAs for 4+ month from when you order.
Ans. Not decided to start a business here yet, just trying to make good use of an already available off the shelf development board in quantities of around 1-10. If some investor is interested they are most welcome.
3. While I can get FPGAs at a lowest price of anyone (quotes up to 100,000 units), cost is still $100-200MH
Ans. I agree FPGA is not cost competitive with ASICs, but I do-not learn much about hardware by buying and installing an ASIC. I think this board allows me to try a lot of different approaches,
including unique approaches such as using an instantiated FPGA based CPU that can run Linux and linking it to the hashing core for a stand-alone device.
4. FPGAs are not designed to work that hard and you will almost always will run into thermal limit before you use all the logic.
Ans. Not sure about that, I used to use SGI RASC blade, a coprocessor blade for SGI Altix servers, and regularly used designs with > 90% FPGA (V4-LX200) utilization.
5. With current difficulty and new ASICs around the corner you will get about $60/GH returned while spending $200/GH around day 80-90 and then your cost of power will be more than it makes.
Bottom line is it's too risky to continue to do bitcoing projects on FPGAs for profit.
Ans. Hopefully the output of open-source projects could be used to make crowd-sourced ASICs or it could be useful for academic use. Who knows. But thanks for your insights, appreciated.
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