https://xf2.org/services/ from jgarzik offers managed services to run private pools.

TheKid: is your 6990 at 830MHz or 880MHz?

Have you guys tried poclbm? So far, the best performance numbers I have heard about on the 6990 (with bios switch at position 2 = 830MHz) are:

o 683 Mhash/s using hdminer
o 550 Mhash/s using DiabloMiner (reported by Syke)
o ? Mhash/s using poclbm

Oops I meant 11.3. And it works with 11.2 if you write the xorg.conf manually.


^{Single HD6990 mining with CAL 1.4.1332 (Catalyst 11.3) on Linux}

Not true. I mine happily with multiple 6990s with the catalyst 11.411.3 driver on Linux.
To my surprise, even the older 11.311.2 works, if you write the xorg.conf manually.

That said I do use a custom CAL miner, as opposed to OpenCL, so perhaps the problems preventing you guys from using the 6990 only affect OpenCL miners.


Edited to fix catalyst version numbers.

30s? Why so complex? The 5-second VGA Dummy Plug !

Why is it strange? It is the norm in the IT industry. The best performance/$ is almost always provided by mass-produced commodity hardware, as opposed to low volume high-end enterprise gear. A desktop GPU costs $200, but a HPC one with equal performance costs $2000 (both AMD and Nvidia segment the market the same way); a desktop HDD costs $50/TB, but a server hdd $500/TB; and so on. High-end enterprise gear tends to have poor perf/$ either because manufacturers cannot leverage economies of scale, or more often because of artificial market segmentation. That's why for example Google built their entire infrastructure on commodity hardware. They wouldn't be as profitable as they are if they run on, say, Dell PowerEdge servers.


Yep. The code is already performing at the theoretical maximum speed.

Correct.

You are correct. I forgot about the artificial FP64 crippling.

Mahkul, I pledge 100 BTC, up to a maximum of 500 BTC, for the "shops" category of your pledge.

So far Bitcoins users and miners have grown faster than the number of shops. It is very important that, in addition to trade between individuals, we have as many shops or merchants accepting Bitcoins as possible to make the Bitcoin economy more stable and robust.

To qualify, the shop must match the current description that Mahkul gave: Google page rank of 3 or above, the person must post to this thread beforehand, etc.

No, Tesla GPUs have the exact same FP64, FP32, and integer performance per clock than consumer GTX GPUs, because they are the same ASICs. (The GTX 470 has a slightly higher mining speed than the M2050 because of a slightly higher shader clock: 1215 vs. 1150 MHz).

~80 Mhash/s is the theoretical maximum on this GPU. Nvidia GPUs are significantly slower than AMD GPUs because of the reasons explained here (fewer ALUs, no rotate instruction):

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Why_a_GPU_mines_faster_than_a_CPU#Why_are_AMD_GPUs_faster_than_Nvidia_GPUs?

On Linux, you can use up to 8 AMD GPUs, not 6.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=42

Too late. They are racked and mining. Sorry I will have more time for optimizing the power consumption when/if I get a next batch of cards.

Yep:

HD 6990 (@sw1, 880MHz): 746 Mhash/s, 410 W, 1.82 Mhash/J
HD 6990 (@sw2, 830MHz, default): 708 Mhash/s, 346 W, 2.05 Mhash/J
HD 5970: 569 Mhash/s, 275 W, 2.07 Mhash/J
(Measurements taken while running hdminer, with a clamp meter at the three sources of power: slot + two power connectors.)

I would not recommend to mine at 880MHz since it is about 8% less power efficient than at 830MHz. Also, contrary to what is believed, the Mhash/J rate of the HD 6990 is not so bad at 830MHz when compared to the good old 5970.

christopher.mcpatrick@microsoft.com disagrees with you. His email his 35 character long :-)

Yes, sounds about right. Except I started selling in January when the market of interested buyers was much larger.

I would advise dedicated miners to go diskless. All my miners netboot from NFS. No UPS. No disk. No thumbdrive.
This takes filesystem corruption out of the equation, and greatly simplifies management of a mining cluster.

Give my share of the 50BTC to the EFF. Their Bitcoin address is listed on: https://www.eff.org/helpout

Currently, hdminer is not redistribuable, as specified by its license. However if a pool operator would have such special needs, I am willing to arrange a special deal.

It is true that hdminer's target market is not the individual with 1 or 2 GPUs. Many of my customers are, or at least appear to be large-scale miners. Of course, I cannot divulge any details.

Not anymore. They abandoned it because a decent foundry these days costs multiple billion of dollars which is estimated to be a large fraction the classified budget of the NSA. They now produce chips by buying production capacity from semiconductor companies through the TAPO program.