Amoveo algorithm is now available by downloading our latest microSD image at https://www.enterpoint.co.uk/products/cairnsmore-5/.

We have found an Ethernet bug that appears with some but not all gigabit hubs/switches. This is purely at startup and there are a number of ways to get past this initial startup issue. We are posting one of these on the main product webpage https://www.enterpoint.co.uk/products/cairnsmore-5/ . Once the gigabit link is up there are no further issues. There are no issues with 10/100 hubs and switches.

A work around is available now on the product webpage. We also noted that we don't tend to have the issue with D-Link gigabit switches but do see it with Netgear gigabit Switches. Others we don't know yet.

We are now testing radiator solutions for the first rack solution which will be between 4 and 6 boards in a 6U 19" rack together with radiator, pump and power supply.

We have a choice of connections to the coldplate. The standard is 6mm stems shown below.

Amoveo and Denarius bitstreams are running roughly at about 200W in the current versions. I think with add-on modules kept reasonable I think a max power of maybe 300W is to be expected over all bitstreams. We have run 200W off a single PCIe cable (good quality PSU) but I would not recommend it. Using twin PCIe keeps the cables in the comfortable zone and that doesn't meant using splitters. Use proper off the PSU cables. We have seen splitters melt in the past and nearly go on fire.

Thermally it is probably just about possible to run with air cooling at 200W on CM5 but there are noise and efficiency aspects to consider. Like many performance FPGAs and similar the Arria10 we use has a thermal runaway aspect which means the hotter it gets the more power it takes. Doesn't necessarily mean yet get more hashing but it certainly drops efficiency. With the current liquid cooling coldplate typically we get the Arria10 (2off -200W running) sitting 35-45degC above the ambient temperature that the radiator sits in. So with radiator in a 20degC room the Arria10 die might be around 60-65degC. That is comfortable and good for Arria10 lifetime and reliability. I'd expect an air cooled solution to be more like 90-95degC. Apart from efficiency running at 90-95degC that could be a lifetime limiting factor. At 60-65degC we expect a very long lifetime on Arria10.

Noise on a liquid cooled setup is good. I can stand next to a test rig with 10 boards hashing and talk in a normal voice. That's with radiators and pumps next to boards and not semi-remote outside which can be even more thermally efficient if it is colder outside. With a air cooled setup of the same numbers of boards I would be wearing ear defenders and shouting at people to communicate.

Yes dedmaroz is working with us. He has said in public that he is only workng on 2 boards one of those being Cairnsmore5. We also have 3 or 4 other developers working with us as well and once our team has reduced load we will be doing something in that area as well. 

There is a new pricing structure now in place that has a small discount for numbers it's slightly more expensive(5-10%) in low numbers that the early adopter pricing mainly to reflect addition costs we added to the design at various points in the design process.

Cairnsmore5 ex-works pricing (excluding VAT, sales tax, shipping, insurance etc.)         
Purchase Quantity   USD $ Price   GBP £ Price   Euro € Price (monthly  changed exchange rate)
1-9   $1,750.00   £1,350.00   €1,620.00
10-24   $1,730.00   £1,330.00   €1,600.00
25-49   $1,700.00   £1,300.00   €1,560.00
50+   $1,680.00   £1,290.00   €1,550.00

We are just starting to ship the early adopter preorders and generally production is picking up now. If you want to order email cairnsmore5@enterpoint.co.uk and we will send you the formal offer document.

Nobody as yet has talked about a group offer and previously flat and now near flat pricing structure don't make much sense as a group buy.

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Update on bitstreams - Amoveo and Denarius(Tribus) are now available. More coming soon.

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Bitstream page created at https://www.enterpoint.co.uk/products/cairnsmore-5/cairnsmore-5-bitstreams/ . More coming on this shortly.

Updates for the Controller Linux subsystem and various other tools now linked off the main product webpage https://www.enterpoint.co.uk/products/cairnsmore-5/ .

Yes can ship to China.

Bitstream announcements coming shortly.

Some pictures of the Simple Interface Board which the first of the accessory items for this product. It's aimed at users with small numbers of boards. There will be backplane and rack offerings as well.

Board fitted with simple interface.

Fair points and stages 1,2,3 have stretched out for a combination of reasons. The first part of this was it took us longer to complete the initial design than anticipated and that was mainly due to us having to redesign the controller and power sections a few times to shrink circuit size and to allow running at higher power levels as requested by our potential bitstream providers. The next part of the delay was the crypto wobble we saw in late 2018 and we ourselves took a few weeks to evaluate the situation and basically delayed building dev boards and going forward to making the offer to customers. The same wobble also meant that it has taken longer to get to the critical mass of orders. We also slipped in a large unrelated rush customer job to improve our funding and give us more options on how we did the build.

The next part of what is happening is that we are mainly reliant on outside developers for bitstreams. We do have a very junior member of our team doing an initial first algorithm backup it needs one of our senior people to be free to help get that running. This option was only ever meant to be a last resort and our senior team focus is still on the evaluation of the Issue1, getting Issue 1.1 to developers, and the now running customer build. External devs are delayed on lack of hardware and basically overloading and of course this is a concern. However in the worst scenario we can simply turn most our very experienced FPGA team to algorithm development and that will happen about late February/early March should no other bitstreams be available. We do have have public statements by Whitefire/Zetheron on Discord stating they will be providing bitstreams and they are just one of several devs working with us.

The main FPGAs are not a secret on the design and there is more on this in Discord but they can actually be read off the block diagram available on the product webpage. They are Intel Arria10 GX1150 and there are two of those on board. Arria10 selection table giving resource outline here - https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/programmable/us/en/pdfs/literature/pt/arria-10-product-table.pdf . The board has a USB hub inbuilt and off that an inbuilt JTAG programmer that works directly with Intel Quartus tools. That's the crude programming mechanism. The on board Cyclone5 SoC will run Linux and offer a pile of other bitstream loading options.

We did consider forms of escrow with senior member community but we have difficulty in justifying the costs given out low margin and also that we are a reputable business trading for 30 years next month without any black marks on our record. That's public record if anyone cares to look it up and a longer public record than pretty much anyone else in crypto community. The crypto community also has a lot of experience in our previous product Cairnsmore1 from 2012/2013 where we used a very similar product launch mechanism and dare I say lots of people made good money out that product. Nobody lost out with us on that development. On the CM1 development/product launch we took peoples funds, we kept to timeline pretty much, and external developers delivered bitstreams in time for the first boards shipping. That was before external developers even had a monetary reason to do the work which is one major change today with dev fees being common practise.

We have recognised early customers risk with an extended purchase discount scheme going forward and there will be a more formal structure coming for that in the next few weeks.

Hope that explains where we are on this project to everyone here. I'll be happy to answer questions as soon as I see them although there may be more delay on here versus the cairnsmore5 email address or on Discord as I have to reconfigure my email alerts here. Just one of many jobs on my task list currently.

For Cairnsmore1 users there is now a Amoveo implementation available on https://github.com/dedmarozz/Amoveo-Cairnsmore1-FPGA-Miner/releases .

I think most of us wish that. We took a short pause on this to improve a few things in the CM5 design and evaluate the situation. We think it is still very much viable given how much better ROI we think there is in the product versus others. In context Bitcoin particularly has crashed many times before and always come back stronger. I think that will be true for all the stringer coins. It might be the more obscure coins might die snd leave a clearer more concise set of coins for people to work with. That's my guess.

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Pictures of the Issue1 are now on our webpage https://www.enterpoint.co.uk/products/cairnsmore-5/.

Offical offer released with first batch scheduled to ship March 2019.

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Maybe a little off topic but Amoveo miner implementation now available for Cairnsmore1. Get it here https://github.com/dedmarozz/Amoveo-Cairnsmore1-FPGA-Miner/releases .

We are hoping this will get rebuilt and appear on the Cairnsmore5 platform before too long.

The preorder is just in the "I'm interested" stage send an email to cairnsmore5@enterpoint.co.uk to get on the interest list and you will get sent the formal order term and conditions when we release those.

Not as yet. We will give stats as soon as we have them on actual algorithms. We do expect good performance but that's just based on our 15 years doing FPGA boards and 25 years generally in programmable logic.

Now out of preorder stage. Contact us on email cairnsmore5@enterpoint.co.uk if you are interested.










Products details will be updated on webpage https://www.enterpoint.co.uk/products/cairnsmore-5/.
Product outline

2 x Intel Arria10 GX1150 FPGAs on board.
Liquid cooling as standard.
Each FPGA has 2 x DDR4 SODIMM socket (we may support QDR4 by custom module TBC)
Each FPGA has core power supply which is adjustable.
Onboard additional Cyclone5 SOC with ARM processor for standalone mining.
USB slave for PC hosted mining.
Expansion port for multi-board working.
Built in programmer for JTAG programming.

I don't know if it is what you want for disabling but there is "Beeper Ringing" option on the Miner Configuration menu window.

With ASICs it has always been on the cards that suppliers with their own ASIC would retreat into just supplying their own mine. This might be for the reason of protecting their own rig earnings but at a more basic level if you are making a low profit on hardware why have the hassle and costs of customer support, logistics and the chance they will not pay you if the market goes the wrong way. Hopefully Bitfury ASICs will become available again at a reasonable price but given my statement above they might not.

We are now in a period where the market will start to become more stable. It won't stop growing but the growth will become more controlled. X200+ growth in hashing power in the last year has been somewhat explosive. With ASICs appearing already at 28nm it is unlikely that newer ASIC technologies will offer much over these in cost reduction for Bitcoin in the short term so there is unlikely to be big advantages in people doing technology jumps like we have seen in the last 12 months. So it will be down to more of a grind, low margins, and how much your electric costs. That might mean a handful of super-rigs in the world, based in low electric cost sites, and basically controlled by ASIC producers with 90% of the network.

Image showing 2 modules with 2 different heatsink options. More on this when we are ready to launch.

It is not much extra work over what we have to do for CM4 to make CM3 hash so we think it is worth completing that work. We have enough stock of chips to give us some return for doing the work. It is also possible that the second generation Avalon will appear as promised and if those are compatible with gen1 footprints we can build CM3 with gen2 chips as soon as they are available or make small design changes to accomodate the gen2.

We are working on CM3 in parallel to CM4 and we have development prototypes that look a bit like the picture of the CM4 where we are working on 1 cluster of chips. A lot of the software control functions are actually common with CM4 and I expect both products will be ready in a similar timeframe.

One of our test boards with the new concept Cairnsmore4 and Controller1 module fitted. This board supports 16 Clusters of up to 9 Bitfury ASICs. We will talk more about the spec and pricing when we are happy with the firmware/software, thermal solution and are ready to ship. Meanwhile enjoy.