"Avalon" ASIC, announcement & pre-order. pre-order over. project started.

[BitcoinINV]

I like what I see!

[luffy]

i guess if a refund is to happen (for any reason) it would be in the currency that has been used (dollar,btc,...etc)?

[ngzhang]

I will be incredibly excited if I see an order for test equipment from smic with a device name of "avalon" on my desk in the near future, but I am guessing it wont happen.

it will 100% happen if 300 order are filled.  

and if you want one on "your" desk, don't forget to order in 2012.9.23

i guess if a refund is to happen (for any reason) it would be in the currency that has been used (dollar,btc,...etc)?

maybe it's better to use BTCs.

[BR0KK]

ill definitely by one or two

[theasian09]

I will be incredibly excited if I see an order for test equipment from smic with a device name of "avalon" on my desk in the near future, but I am guessing it wont happen.

it will 100% happen if 300 order are filled.  

and if you want one on "your" desk, don't forget to order in 2012.9.23

i guess if a refund is to happen (for any reason) it would be in the currency that has been used (dollar,btc,...etc)?

maybe it's better to use BTCs.

I actually work for a company that makes equipment for testing wafers.  the quantities you're talking about are probably too small to warrant smic ordering any custom equipment from us (1 piece costs about $75,000 usd).

[Transisto]

Count me in for one or two, If only for the sake of decentralization.

Edit :  If this thing is to consume 600w, I think we can save almost 80$ for PSU + shipping.   I'd guess, like many miners, I won't have much use for these 80+ Gold PSUs

[flynn]

Count me in for one or two, If only for the sake of decentralization.

Edit :  If this thing is to consume 600w, I think we can save almost 80$ for PSU + shipping.   I'd guess, like many miners, I won't have much use for these 80+ Gold PSUs

I really think that 600W number was a wild guess. It will be a lot less.
I trust ngzhang to make good technical choices.

[Transisto]

Count me in for one or two, If only for the sake of decentralization.

Edit :  If this thing is to consume 600w, I think we can save almost 80$ for PSU + shipping.   I'd guess, like many miners, I won't have much use for these 80+ Gold PSUs

I really think that 600W number was a wild guess. It will be a lot less.
I trust ngzhang to make good technical choices.

Anyway, Just a reminder that many of us already have a shitload of soon to be retiring PSUs.

[kano]

i understand your worry about. i think now what i have is only my personal reputation but i ensure Avalon project will much transparent than any other project. during Oct. we will have enough technique details. include documents, accurate specs, etc.

Thank you! I would be happy to find out that I'm wrong now. Please don't think that I want to insult anyone, I just want people make good and weighted decisions.

There are a few hardware developers with a clear good track record here on the bitcointalk forum.
ngzhang is one of them.
Maybe you should read up a bit first ...

[gyverlb]

Anyway, Just a reminder that many of us already have a shitload of soon to be retiring PSUs.

Indeed, many of us have monorails 80+ gold units. We'll either flood ebay with them or try to reuse them any way we can :-)

[kano]

I agree broadly, mining software allocating 60GH/s of work is not going to be an insignificant load on the CPU that's running the show, particularly if the CPU is just an off the shelf ARM Cortex (imagine a single Cortex running 60GH/s of FPGAs). Avalon could potentially be a pretty power efficient device should this be the case.

You are kidding right ? 60GH/s -> ~15 nonce ranges/s. If the CPU load is anything but a small blip even on a Raspberry Pi, change your miner software.

Well ... I know one person mining with 2 MiniRigs ~51GH/s that uses less than 2% on his CPU.
I'll get the info later about the CPU and the downclock it's running also ...

It's an intel Xeon E31240 running at full clock 3.3GHz using less than 2% total of a single CPU

Now his devices are BFL MiniRigs cards (2 MiniRigs - 37 cards) and those devices require polling so the CPU comparison may not be very similar - i.e. his rig may need more CPU

The actual CPU performance will depend on how the final protocol works.
If, as I suspect, you simply need to ask the device for a reply and wait (and you also get a final completion reply) then the CPU usage will be lower even than the current Icarus hardware.
Also, the pool you use is important, if they support both roll-n-time and high difficulty shares that also makes a difference.

[jimbobway]

Count me in for one or two, If only for the sake of decentralization.

Edit :  If this thing is to consume 600w, I think we can save almost 80$ for PSU + shipping.   I'd guess, like many miners, I won't have much use for these 80+ Gold PSUs

I really think that 600W number was a wild guess. It will be a lot less.
I trust ngzhang to make good technical choices.

The BFL singles plug into a computer.  These Avalon devices are stand alone.  A computer is at least 200W probably, right?  My question is how does BFL wattage + computer wattage compare with just the Avalon standalone wattage?

[jimbobway]

I actually work for a company that makes equipment for testing wafers.  the quantities you're talking about are probably too small to warrant smic ordering any custom equipment from us (1 piece costs about $75,000 usd).

Is your company based in China?

[CleverMiner]

Count me in for one or two, If only for the sake of decentralization.

Edit :  If this thing is to consume 600w, I think we can save almost 80$ for PSU + shipping.   I'd guess, like many miners, I won't have much use for these 80+ Gold PSUs

I really think that 600W number was a wild guess. It will be a lot less.
I trust ngzhang to make good technical choices.

The BFL singles plug into a computer.  These Avalon devices are stand alone.  A computer is at least 200W probably, right?  My question is how does BFL wattage + computer wattage compare with just the Avalon standalone wattage?

No computer consume as little as 30watt, think netbook or HTPC.  BFL merely use an usb port and you can add as many as you want with USB hubs. (128)

[midnightmagic]

I'm extremely happy to see that you have announced this ASIC device for preorder. Your style of development and openness, and use of open source software, open PCB layouts, and published bitstream source (at least with the Icarus) are inspirations that a great deal of people including myself sincerely appreciate. I believe your approach is one of the most compatible with bitcoin and the philosophy behind it. Thank you for stepping up and joining the ASIC fray. If your historical awesomeness continues, nothing but good things can come from your participation in the marketplace.

After all the strange behaviour elsewhere, I am very relieved you made it out with a new product: your designs are a kind of control-rod moderator in the hype machines of some of your competition.

Water in the desert my good man, water in the desert..

[yochdog]

very cool stuff

[jjshabadoo]

Good to see nzhang in there.

[Luke-Jr]

host PC NOT required
---so there's a controller embedded? it would be upgradeable, right? I hope the final product will support stratum mining protocol.
http://mining.bitcoin.cz/stratum-mining

it's a linux embedded system. which is running cgminer or something like that.

FWIW, BFGMiner already supports the standard ASIC-ready getblocktemplate mining protocol.

[theasian09]

Count me in for one or two, If only for the sake of decentralization.

Edit :  If this thing is to consume 600w, I think we can save almost 80$ for PSU + shipping.   I'd guess, like many miners, I won't have much use for these 80+ Gold PSUs

I really think that 600W number was a wild guess. It will be a lot less.
I trust ngzhang to make good technical choices.

The BFL singles plug into a computer.  These Avalon devices are stand alone.  A computer is at least 200W probably, right?  My question is how does BFL wattage + computer wattage compare with just the Avalon standalone wattage?

No computer consume as little as 30watt, think netbook or HTPC.  BFL merely use an usb port and you can add as many as you want with USB hubs. (128)

the mk802 while not sure if you want to consider it a computer...but it does have linux builds that run on it.
Net books dont use very much power, the adapters are about 40 watts...take away the lcd and the hard drive and it can definitely go below 30 watts.

[Cranky4u]

is there a power budget cap for pre-order deisgns?

I ask this because electricity costs are a major factor in Australia...currently I pay AU$0.22kW/hr (about US$0.25kW/hr) so the GH/s : kW/hr is my main assessment tool