Who Are The Manufactures Currently Selling Chips ?

[sidehack]

The answer to "I want to mine bitcoins" is never "mine something that's not bitcoin".

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[philipma1957]

The answer to "I want to mine bitcoins" is never "mine something that's not bitcoin".

Problem is Bitcoin has been made not profitable by ASIC builders while

Gpu mining is making money mining  eth coin.

The s-7 costs 650 if you need a psu

It costs 505 if you do not need a psu.

The s-7

Will earn 83 back at 10 cents then the 1/2 ing
Will earn 101back at 9 cents then the  1/2 ing
Will earn 119back at 8 cents  then the 1/2 ing
Will earn 137back at 7 cents  then the 1/2 ing
Will earn 155back at 6 cents then the  1/2 ing

This is really hard to,buy into.


I have heard smaller miner are dead the farms will,kill them off

For three years I think this time it is going to be true.

[sidehack]

Right. However, Ethereum is not bitcoin. If someone says "I want to build a miner and make money any way I can", sure alts are one way to go. But if someone wants to mine bitcoins, alts is not the answer. And "mine an altcoin with GPUs" is definitely not the answer to "I would like Bitcoin mining ASICs".

To address the actual question, I don't know of anyone actively selling chips. Bitfury has claimed they'll do it, and word was circulating that they delivered some sample chips to third-party builders a while ago but if they did there weren't many and they were guys with lots of money. Avalon's not selling, Bitmain never really sold, and I haven't heard anything out of InnoSilicon but it might not hurt to ask what they're up to.

[cloudnthings]

I saw this from Innosilicon re A4: http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/13.html dated Mar 30 16 so relatively recent. I'll say hello to them and see what they say.

I've seen the MoonLander from jstefanop which looks awesome and the last he wrote was that he is looking into the A4 so I assume it's not impossible. Maybe the ordering quantity needs to be huge to get in the door?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Innosilison is an interesting question. I'll have o look back in my A1 chip kerfuffle files but I think they used GF (Global Foundries) to run the wafers. If so and they use GF again then they would have the 14nm node to play with. Since the GF 14nm fab is in Malta NY means no earthquake delay so... Wonder what they have been up to.

Sure the A1 was way off promised spec for speed  vs power but -- accepting its real world specs it was rock solid when used by integrators that knew how to build boards. The boards that AMT/Bitmine.ch tried were a disaster of zero knowledge of PDN design rules and ignorant thermal design whereas Dragon clones clones were rock-solid.

The 1.2TH  Dragon clone I eventually got from AMT in early Sept. 2014 (7mo late but I was lucky - I got one!) ran rock solid 24x7x365 right up to last Feb. when I finally shut it down to apply the 1.3kw power it used for a s7 located elsewhere at work.

That makes me wonder about Inno's silence about an A4...

EDIT: Just saw that question was answered while I was writing   and damn -- it's a scrypt chip. However, got to love the fact that they even give the chip layouts!
http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/13.html
Raises the question of, 'What about another BTC miner ASIC?'.

[alh]

........

That makes me wonder about Inno's silence about an A4...

EDIT: Just saw that question was answered while I was writing   and damn -- it's a scrypt chip. However, got to love the fact that they even give the chip layouts!
http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/13.html
Raises the question of, 'What about another BTC miner ASIC?'.

I thought I heard that Innosilicon was actually doing TWO chips (i.e. an A3 and A4). One was Scrypt, and the other SHA256. It sounded ambitious to me, but I am 99% sure they are doing a BTC centric chip as well. As for it's actual status, that's a different question.......

[cloudnthings]

An updated news release on the progress of the A4 chip. They are taking preorders for shipment in 2 months time.

"The A4 Dominator ASIC, priced at discounted $12 per chip for early birds, will continue the fantastic A2 Terminator legacy in serving our mining community. With the unbeatable price and performance, A4 Dominator ASIC/Miner will revolutionize how we mine coins for the years to come."

Ref: http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/14.html

After reading the SFARD saga I'm not sure what to think now.

[QuintLeo]

........

That makes me wonder about Inno's silence about an A4...

EDIT: Just saw that question was answered while I was writing   and damn -- it's a scrypt chip. However, got to love the fact that they even give the chip layouts!
http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/13.html
Raises the question of, 'What about another BTC miner ASIC?'.

I thought I heard that Innosilicon was actually doing TWO chips (i.e. an A3 and A4). One was Scrypt, and the other SHA256. It sounded ambitious to me, but I am 99% sure they are doing a BTC centric chip as well. As for it's actual status, that's a different question.......

 A4 and miners due out on it June/July timeframe.

 Their silence on the A3 has been deafening - starting to wonder if it's another LK-1401 in efficiency but came to market too late to be viable with it.

 Unlike SFARDS the Innosilicon company has a rather long track record in chip design - they were around as a chip design house BEFORE Bitcoin existed, which makes them pretty much unique in the industry - and they have a MUCH better rep for delivering on gear when they announce it will be available than most, and THE TOP rep for reliable chips AND board-level design work (Gridseed/SFARDS seems to have had good chips, but crap for board-level designs).

 I saw somewhere that they're talking "100k chip quantity or don't bother" at this point - that might change as they get more gear out the door.
 Sadly, I don't see Sidehack designing a "small" miner, but the Moonlander guy probably would, and Innosilicon themselves will probably release some smaller miners similar to the Mini and the Farm Boy.



 As of RIGHT NOW though, it appears that nobody is selling recent chips to anyone other than major integrators or large farms that roll their own boards.

[sidehack]

If you mean a small scrypt miner, no I won't. If you mean a small BTC miner, I've got a few designs already in progress.

[cloudnthings]

If you mean a small scrypt miner, no I won't. If you mean a small BTC miner, I've got a few designs already in progress.

Can I ask where you source your chips from? Or is that like asking how much someone earns? (If so apologies in advanced)

[sidehack]

I earn about 30% over the poverty line for my state, which basically means "all my monthly bills are paid, plus about $50 a week for food". No shame there.

Right now I can only get chips by pulling from existing hardware. If BitFury will ever get off their butts and decide to start talking, I was told four months ago I'd have access to their chips. In theory there's talks with Avalon as well. What I'd really like to see is an independent development project set up just for the community, like PlanetCrypto has been talking about for a year or so. That's probably the only way third parties can guarantee getting chips in a reasonably affordable manner.

[cloudnthings]

No shame at all. You're doing much better than me. I quit my job 5 months ago to get back to my hardware/software engineering root. Got sick of having meetings about meetings in the corporate world.

Seen some of the hardware stuff you've created (and others in this community) and it is awesome. My dream would be to create small miners like how you and the likes of jstefanop do and help the community, open source it but most of all, walk into high schools and universities down under here (NZ/AUS) and share the knowledge and increase awareness.

Sourcing chips seems to be a nightmare though.

[sidehack]

I've been self-employed for 4 years, somehow scraping by the whole time. Been making a living from serving the bitcoin economy for about two and a half years.

Yep, sourcing chips is a nightmare. I guess I got lucky that Bitmain was even willing to talk to me last spring, and even luckier that they sold me some chips.

[philipma1957]

I've been self-employed for 4 years, somehow scraping by the whole time. Been making a living from serving the bitcoin economy for about two and a half years.

Yep, sourcing chips is a nightmare. I guess I got lucky that Bitmain was even willing to talk to me last spring, and even luckier that they sold me some chips.

Yeah I thought they would sell the s-7 chips to you.  Would have been really nice compac sticks.

I know I have been going on about   switching to other coins I have  been sooooo frustrated  as I finally got a decent power deal with the solar array and I can't get better asic gear.

We are holding back on adding gear  to have room for more efficient units. As the array has a power limit.

[cloudnthings]

I've been self-employed for 4 years, somehow scraping by the whole time. Been making a living from serving the bitcoin economy for about two and a half years.

Yep, sourcing chips is a nightmare. I guess I got lucky that Bitmain was even willing to talk to me last spring, and even luckier that they sold me some chips.

That is awesome. Yeah, I guess we all manage to scrape by when we need to.

Can I ask re: design of a board, when you managed to get some chips, how much support did you get from the manufacturers? ie datasheets, dev boards, sample pcb layouts or did you basically just get the chips and had to figure out the rest?

The reason I got excited about SFARD is because they had a lot of this material available as open source.

[sidehack]

All I got was the publicly-available datasheet.

[cloudnthings]

All I got was the publicly-available datasheet.

Ah, so you had to MacGyver the rest. That's impressive.

[sidehack]

Well, the datasheet had enough pinout and power info. The software fortunately is compatible with BM1382 so U3 code was adaptable.

The Avalon chip, now that's a bit of MacGyver. There's no public datasheet, at least not that I've found, so I worked up a pinout from probing an Avalon6 board and VH is working on figuring out the protocol from guesswork and Avalon's previous four generations of available datasheet.

[MacEntyre]

I've been self-employed for 4 years, somehow scraping by the whole time. Been making a living from serving the bitcoin economy for about two and a half years.

Yep, sourcing chips is a nightmare. I guess I got lucky that Bitmain was even willing to talk to me last spring, and even luckier that they sold me some chips.

Yeah I thought they would sell the s-7 chips to you.  Would have been really nice compac sticks.

I know I have been going on about   switching to other coins I have  been sooooo frustrated  as I finally got a decent power deal with the solar array and I can't get better asic gear.

We are holding back on adding gear  to have room for more efficient units. As the array has a power limit.

Since last spring when Sidehack and me were lucky to get some BM-1384 sold, I tried again several times to source BM-1384 or BM-1385 and went through to a guy who is business development manager at Bitmain. I was really teasy and sent some 10 inquiries over the months (I even asked Yoshi himself) and achieved - nothing except making them pissed-off. So yep, sourcing of chips is a nightmare. Three new projects on hold due to that (half way). I already reached the point where I see Bitfury as a glimmer of hope....

[cloudnthings]

Feels like this is a game for the big boys. Something you guys probably knew a long time ago! SFARD's initial philosophy was promising (open source and community driven/support) but I guess they also succumbed to reality/economics.

Well, like they say, if it was easy, everyone would do it.