Butterfly Labs is going to give lifetime warranty

[superfastkyle]

Warranties/support can also put a company out of business. If anyone remembers Quantex/Cybermax computers in the early 2000's. They had good products at a great price, won lots of awards. Their supplier went out of business and then so did they. Leaving many people without support and with broken equipment

sounds to good to be true

I had a lifetime warranty once on a stereo I bought a long time ago.  The stereo still works, but the company that sold it is long gone.

My point is, lifetime could mean lifetime of the company, not the device.

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[Syke]

Some electronics are basically just fixed gates. Like ASICs. They don't wear, and the likelihood of one failing is incredibly small.

/defxor

Anecdote: At home I have an 1987 Atari ST, including a SM124 monochrome monitor and an RLL MFM 30GB hard disk in working condition. The picture quality is slightly unstable, most likely due to the caps in the PSU needing to be exchanged.

Mining wreaks havoc on gates, whether it's a CPU, GPU, FPGA, or ASIC. Mining absolutely hammers it, 24/7/365. Mining will wear out any device far faster than normal usage.

[ice_chill]

Some electronics are basically just fixed gates. Like ASICs. They don't wear, and the likelihood of one failing is incredibly small.

/defxor

Anecdote: At home I have an 1987 Atari ST, including a SM124 monochrome monitor and an RLL MFM 30GB hard disk in working condition. The picture quality is slightly unstable, most likely due to the caps in the PSU needing to be exchanged.

Mining wreaks havoc on gates, whether it's a CPU, GPU, FPGA, or ASIC. Mining absolutely hammers it, 24/7/365. Mining will wear out any device far faster than normal usage.

Actually if you know how hardware functions, a 1GHz CPU will always switch the gates at that frequency when the PC is powered on, once the operating system is loaded it will send a continuous off command to stop the switching of the unused gates when there is nothing to process. So really it makes no difference whether the CPU is processing or is in pre-OS state and switching anyway.

Excess heat and current is what degrades the silicon.

[firefop]

Only heat and specifically, fluctuations in heat, given clean power.

Exactly - given proper care and feeding --- first gen asics should produce until they are ready to be replaced by 4th gen asics. No problem at all.

Especially if they went wish solidstate caps - as the render seems to indicate.

[YokoToriyama]

nice gotta love bFL

[firefop]

It's a good thing - exactly what BFL needed to keep the big money interested. This combined with getting a nice enclosure on the sc-rig... tips it away from other producers. At least for me.

[mrb]

I've worked for the past 7 years as a computer repair technician and 25%~ of hardware failures that I've worked on have been related to faulty memory. I've run into faulty memory on my own machines a couple of times as well. There's a damn good reason why memtest86 is so popular and why RAM diagnostic tools are often built into operating system boot discs and even the bios of many motherboards. RAM fails.. a lot.

20+ years in electronics and computer related fields here: I've seen like 2 sticks of dead RAM ever. I'd say we're both outliers of the real data.

I am not saying the following applies to you, but most people think RAM failures are rare because they are often unable to identify them. When they happen, they cause all sorts of random errors: BSODs, SIGSEGVs, file corruption, etc. The OS is not going to display an error message saying "RAM failure" (even if you use ECC RAM, ECC is not always able to detect multi-bit errors.) And even when you run memtest86, the errors it reports are not always caused by failing RAM; sometimes they are caused by an overheating CPU, faulty motherboard, bad PSU, etc.

It is only in rare cases that RAM failures are easy to identify (eg. when the computer won't even POST with bad RAM). These are the only cases that people will usually identify them as such.

[mrb]

You people need to realize that it is an easy commitment to make to offer "lifetime warranty" for Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware... The reason? In 3-4 years tops, nobody will be interested in running the Butterfly Labs SC ASICs anymore, let alone have them be repaired if they break.

Why is that? Because eitheir Bitcoin will have failed (unlikely IMHO), or Bitcoin will be even more popular, therefore the ASICs will almost surely have already been made obsolete by other next-generation ASICs, more profitable, more power-efficient, maybe 45nm or even 32nm.

[Jack1Rip1BurnIt]

You people need to realize that it is an easy commitment to make to offer "lifetime warranty" for Bitcoin mining ASIC hardware... The reason? In 3-4 years tops, nobody will be interested in running the Butterfly Labs SC ASICs anymore, let alone have them be repaired if they break.

Why is that? Because eitheir Bitcoin will have failed (unlikely IMHO), or Bitcoin will be even more popular, therefore the ASICs will almost surely have already been made obsolete by other next-generation ASICs, more profitable, more power-efficient, maybe 45nm or even 32nm.

+This

Awesome is what I say! If I buy their product I never have to worry about exactly what day I bought it and when the product will lose its warranty. Even if I only use the product for 2 or 3 years I still will not ever worry about it. (Peace of mind = Hysteria in the bitcointalk.org community)

[jojo69]

There is no loophole.  The warranty follows the board, so you can sell it and the warranty is still intact.  Thus you don't need to register it... because we aren't warrantying the fan (at least not past 6 months or a year), there aren't really any seals we are going to be placing on the unit, either. 

Josh,

Have you all discussed a policy regarding customer removal/modification/replacement of the heat sink?

[ice_chill]

Definitely not in 3 years, because ASIC can only be replaced by ASIC so we are likely to see similar speed increases as in GPU to GPU upgrade.

[mrb]

Definitely not in 3 years, because ASIC can only be replaced by ASIC so we are likely to see similar speed increases as in GPU to GPU upgrade.

...and the speed increase of GPUs over 4 years is sufficient to push 4-year-old GPUs out of the market. Therefore nobody will be mining with 4-year-old ASICs.

[Tinua]

What is meant by lifetime warranty?
They sold the SC for Bitcoin mining.
If a code change come in the future, this SC would not mining anymore and would so be a warranty claim? 

[bobitza]

If a code change come in the future, this SC would not mining anymore and would so be a warranty claim? 

I think you're mistaken the Warranty program with the Customer Upgrades program.

[ice_chill]

Definitely not in 3 years, because ASIC can only be replaced by ASIC so we are likely to see similar speed increases as in GPU to GPU upgrade.

...and the speed increase of GPUs over 4 years is sufficient to push 4-year-old GPUs out of the market. Therefore nobody will be mining with 4-year-old ASICs.

Well if we take the GPUs for their main purpose which is gaming and not mining, then a 4 years old GPU is HD4870, while the HD7970 is much better, the HD4870 is by no means obsolete.

A 4 year old CPU is Core 2 Quad 2.6Ghz, while not as good as the Core i7 3770k, it is by no means obsolete.

With ASIC it is different as you are not judging by frames per second, but rather by the money it makes, so they will run for even longer.

What is meant by lifetime warranty?
They sold the SC for Bitcoin mining.
If a code change come in the future, this SC would not mining anymore and would so be a warranty claim? 

Sure, if only we lived in LALA LAND

[Tinua]

What is meant by lifetime warranty?
They sold the SC for Bitcoin mining.
If a code change come in the future, this SC would not mining anymore and would so be a warranty claim? 

Sure, if only we lived in LALA LAND

was only meant in ironic way! 
But, if you think more deep....the device do not work anymore correctly and do what they have to do, bitcoin mining.......Summary...... 

[mrb]

...and the speed increase of GPUs over 4 years is sufficient to push 4-year-old GPUs out of the market. Therefore nobody will be mining with 4-year-old ASICs.

Well if we take the GPUs for their main purpose which is gaming and not mining, then a 4 years old GPU is HD4870, while the HD7970 is much better, the HD4870 is by no means obsolete.

My point is the 4870 is obsolete for mining:

Its revenue: 80 (Mhash/sec) * 3600 (sec/hour) * 730 (hour/month) / (2**32*3054e3 (difficulty factor)) * 50 (BTC/block) * 11.7 (USD/BTC) = $9.40 per month
Its power cost: 0.150 (kW) * 730 (hour/month) * 0.11 (worldwide average $/kWh) = $12.0 per month

So most of the world already loses money mining with a 4870. Even those with insanely low rates, say $0.04/kWh, will be unable to make any profit 2 months from now when the reward drops to 25 BTC/block.

Yes gaming hardware takes longer to become truly obsolete, because graphics quality is not that important to some gamers. But in the world of Bitcoin mining, being profitable or not determines if your hardware is obsolete or not.

[firefop]

...and the speed increase of GPUs over 4 years is sufficient to push 4-year-old GPUs out of the market. Therefore nobody will be mining with 4-year-old ASICs.

Well if we take the GPUs for their main purpose which is gaming and not mining, then a 4 years old GPU is HD4870, while the HD7970 is much better, the HD4870 is by no means obsolete.

My point is the 4870 is obsolete for mining:

Its revenue: 80 (Mhash/sec) * 3600 (sec/hour) * 730 (hour/month) / (2**32*3054e3 (difficulty factor)) * 50 (BTC/block) * 11.7 (USD/BTC) = $9.40 per month
Its power cost: 0.150 (kW) * 730 (hour/month) * 0.11 (worldwide average $/kWh) = $12.0 per month

So most of the world already loses money mining with a 4870. Even those with insanely low rates, say $0.04/kWh, will be unable to make any profit 2 months from now when the reward drops to 25 BTC/block.

Yes gaming hardware takes longer to become truly obsolete, because graphics quality is not that important to some gamers. But in the world of Bitcoin mining, being profitable or not determines if your hardware is obsolete or not.

Also - 4870 is obsolete for games now. I had a pair of 2gb vapor-x cooled version (only 4870 made with 2gb) - I replaced them with a single 5770 - which out performed them. so yes, in computer technology, 3rd generation is end of life. 4th is a doorstop.

[The-Real-Link]

It's a good comparative theory to equate GPUs but then again the purpose of the GPU for most people is driving multimedia and games, not mining BTC.  Thus, the standards radically jump year after year.

ASICs can certainly become smaller or more efficient but since that's ALL they do, as others said, I can't see a 4th Gen ASIC making the first gen worthless.  A year might go by for the second gen to come out but they could only increase performance by ~5%.  Now while that little jump might make sense to changeover by the 4th gen, sure, who wouldn't want to do that?  But it hardly makes the first gen completely obselete.

[mrb]

The-Real-Link: CPUs, GPUs, mining ASICs, etc, all follow Moore's Law. The number of transistors doubles every 18 months, hence doubling the performance for an embarrassingly parallel algorithm such as Bitcoin mining.