Butterfly Labs is going to give lifetime warranty

[bustaballs]

have you ever had memory fail? I thought I did once but it was incorrectly inserted, lol.

All good memory makers give lifetime warranty.

Memory has one of the highest failure rates of any computer component. If there's a hardware issue with a computer it almost always has to do with the ram or hard drive.

[1714885291]

1714885291

[1714885291]

1714885291

[Cranky4u]

As an Engineer, I ask myself what is definition of BFLs "life time warranty"? Is it;
1. The calculated operational lifespan of the circuit board including solder joints, fatigue rates, etc and comes out to 18 months?
2. Is it the industry standard of 25 years = life time?
3. Is it the mean lifetime remaining of the purchaser? i.e. Purchaser is caucasian male with life expectancy of 80 years and he buys it when he is 40 years old, therefore the lifetime warranty is 40 years?

What does the forum think?

More importantly, what does BFL think?

[P_Shep]

It's your accusative tone. You don't know what you're talking about, yet you're still postulating that it's all wrong.

It's just a space model, probably a preliminary one. So you can't regard what you see there as accurate.
What appear big capacitor shapes, may turn out to be smaller caps. Power supplies all need big caps.
Compare it to the pics of the FPGA single. The designs are similar.
Why so many VRMs? Are they even VRMs? Will there be that many in the final design? Perhaps many smaller power VRMs are cheaper than a couple of big ones. 60W is 50A @1.2v. That's pretty hefty.

[SLok]

As an Engineer, I ask myself what is definition of BFLs "life time warranty"? Is it;
1. The calculated operational lifespan of the circuit board including solder joints, fatigue rates, etc and comes out to 18 months?
2. Is it the industry standard of 25 years = life time?
3. Is it the mean lifetime remaining of the purchaser? i.e. Purchaser is caucasian male with life expectancy of 80 years and he buys it when he is 40 years old, therefore the lifetime warranty is 40 years?

What does the forum think?

More importantly, what does BFL think?

Lifetime warranty on a 3 year old OCZ dual-channel memory set was 30% purchase price refund when one of the sticks started to fail. So lifetime seems flexible. In the European Union there's a standard 2 year minimum on electric devices like laptops, tv's etc. Even when failure kicks in at 30 months, there would still be a chance of complete covering of repairs. It depends on the general life expectancy of the device. For a tv, one would expect 6-10 years, so repairs/replacements should be given/priced accordingly.
I would say 36 months for a static device like an SC would be appropriate?

[2112]

It seems that each of the 8 asic chips has their own 3 or 4 phase vrm. Why would this be necessary? or even preferred? it seems like it would cut down on reliability and raise cost. If a 4 phase vrm can handle a 5870 chip at 150 watts why can't it handle all 8 asic chips at less than 100w

Au contraire. Multiple smaller regulators increase reliability and increase overall device yield. The hashing chips are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel .

If one (or more) of the many regulators fails the whole device continues to work at a reduced speed.

And vice versa: the device can be populated with partially defective hashing chips. If the testing discovers a fault in some section of some hashing chip that section could be simply powered down and the whole device will remain useable.

It is quite possible that in order to save money and time the individual hashing chips are only minimally tested before packaging and soldering into the board. The full tests are run only in the final shipping device.

Finally, if the regulators are software-controlled this configuration would allow individual under/over-volting of the individual sections within individual chips.

The comparison to the graphic card is simply invalid because the Bitcoin hasher uses no RAM whatsoever and does not require any high bandwidth bus interface like AGP/PCI/PCIe. It also has no high bandwidth output to the video monitor.

[crazyates]

have you ever had memory fail? I thought I did once but it was incorrectly inserted, lol.

All good memory makers give lifetime warranty.

Memory has one of the highest failure rates of any computer component. If there's a hardware issue with a computer it almost always has to do with the ram or hard drive.

Umm I don't think so. Working the past 2 1/2 years as I data recovery technician, I'll give you the dead hard drives. I see a lot of those, but that's kind of our focus. However, I've only seen a handful of cases where the memory was bad, and they were usually old sticks(10+ years), damaged through ESD, or both.

You wanna talk about failing components? Assuming we're not talking about DOA, I'd be willing to bet budging caps, dead hard drives, faulty PSUs, or OCZ SSDs all have higher failure rates than any RAM chip.

[Syke]

A lifetime warranty on a mining-only device is a nice feature, but likely the lifetime of such a product is about 2 years for most people. By then it's unlikely to be profitable to continue mining on it.

[bustaballs]

have you ever had memory fail? I thought I did once but it was incorrectly inserted, lol.

All good memory makers give lifetime warranty.

Memory has one of the highest failure rates of any computer component. If there's a hardware issue with a computer it almost always has to do with the ram or hard drive.

Umm I don't think so. Working the past 2 1/2 years as I data recovery technician, I'll give you the dead hard drives. I see a lot of those, but that's kind of our focus. However, I've only seen a handful of cases where the memory was bad, and they were usually old sticks(10+ years), damaged through ESD, or both.

You wanna talk about failing components? Assuming we're not talking about DOA, I'd be willing to bet budging caps, dead hard drives, faulty PSUs, or OCZ SSDs all have higher failure rates than any RAM chip.

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.

You're right about the power supplies. That also have high failure rates.

[iongchun]

A lifetime warranty on a mining-only device is a nice feature, but likely the lifetime of such a product is about 2 years for most people. By then it's unlikely to be profitable to continue mining on it.

I absolutely agree with you, plus it brings good PR to BFL.
Like RAM modules or SD cards, customers lost interest to old products quite soon that life warranty is not a burden to vendors,
unless the failure rate is too high in the short term.

[MrTeal]

I do not think 'diaspora' means what you think it means.

That, and some of their fact checking could use some work.

Finally, DeepBit has released a line of ASICs of their own. DeepBit is well known for having been, at one point, the largest Bitcoin mining pool. DeepBit even exceeded 50% of the network’s total hash power for a few brief moments in 2011, although the mining pool has shrunk considerably in recent months, and is now not even close to first place[2].

[squeept]

have you ever had memory fail? I thought I did once but it was incorrectly inserted, lol.

All good memory makers give lifetime warranty.

Memory has one of the highest failure rates of any computer component. If there's a hardware issue with a computer it almost always has to do with the ram or hard drive.

Umm I don't think so. Working the past 2 1/2 years as I data recovery technician, I'll give you the dead hard drives. I see a lot of those, but that's kind of our focus. However, I've only seen a handful of cases where the memory was bad, and they were usually old sticks(10+ years), damaged through ESD, or both.

You wanna talk about failing components? Assuming we're not talking about DOA, I'd be willing to bet budging caps, dead hard drives, faulty PSUs, or OCZ SSDs all have higher failure rates than any RAM chip.

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.

You're right about the power supplies. That also have high failure rates.

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.

Heat and moving parts are the usual culprits. So I'd say hard drives and power supplies as well. I wouldn't say capacitors are generally likely to fail, but if you specify electrolytic caps, that's a whole different story.

Whenever I read a review on Newegg that says an item was DOA, I laugh because they almost certainly broke it themselves.

[mdude77]

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.

M

[mdude77]

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.

You're right about the power supplies. That also have high failure rates.

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.

Heat and moving parts are the usual culprits. So I'd say hard drives and power supplies as well. I wouldn't say capacitors are generally likely to fail, but if you specify electrolytic caps, that's a whole different story.

Whenever I read a review on Newegg that says an item was DOA, I laugh because they almost certainly broke it themselves.

I've been using computers for 20 years.  Maybe once did I have memory fail.  I'm pretty sure I had memory failure because of a lightning strike as well.

Hard drives, well, I've replaced a good number through warranty, and it wasn't "lifetime".  There's a reason HDD manufacturers give 3-5 years and memory manufacturers give lifetime.  As you said above, those things with moving parts go first.  Think fans, power supplies, HDDs. 

M

[Mobius]

As an Engineer, I ask myself what is definition of BFLs "life time warranty"? Is it;
1. The calculated operational lifespan of the circuit board including solder joints, fatigue rates, etc and comes out to 18 months?
2. Is it the industry standard of 25 years = life time?
3. Is it the mean lifetime remaining of the purchaser? i.e. Purchaser is caucasian male with life expectancy of 80 years and he buys it when he is 40 years old, therefore the lifetime warranty is 40 years?

What does the forum think?

More importantly, what does BFL think?

Like many statements from BFL - sketchy, suspicious and undefined.

[elux]

Okay, let's think about this for a minute...

What other highly complicated electronic device, marketed to the consumer gets sold with a free >5 year warranty?

This is BFL's first generation ASIC design. Not some small change to an existing, proven, reliable design.
It's an untested product. Not one device has been shipped to customer yet.

And they're suddently offering a unlimited "lifetime" warranty at no added cost.

They have no data on failure rates. What is the MTBF of the BFL SCs?
What is the rate of defective products from manufacturing? Is it 1/10 or 1/100000?
Who knows? Nobody knows. Because this data cannot exist yet.

The thing is, hardware design is hard, to the point that even Intel fucks up badly from time to time,
to the point that they have to issue total and hence extremely expensive recalls.

Any number of things can happen. Especially with a brand new design.
Especially when rolling out four products simultaneously. Especially for a 22 person company.

Bugs can be subtle, yet fatal. Components may not play along nicely.
Problems can take time to surface. Problems aren't always detected in testing.

Does BFL have the appropriate insurance in place in case something bad happens? (How much would that cost?)

At first glance, I fail to see see how this makes any economic sense.
(Except of course from a pre-order / marketing / sales perspective.)

Here's a final question, left simply as an exercise to the reader:
What would the world have to look like for this "risk free gift" to make sense?

[bitmar]

LOL    BFL is the first company in history which gives a lifetime warranty on product that does not exist and has not been tested. This is a very impressive....  

Compared to the BFL companies such as Intel, Nvidia, AMD looks pathetic

[firefop]

Maybe I'm missing something but these are my thoughts. I'm not a chip manufacturer or a electrical engineer, but I have built computer systems for almost 15 years. Your 3d model doesn't look right to me, it looks overly complicated. Here are my concerns, I would love you to prove me wrong.

It seems that each of the 8 asic chips has their own 3 or 4 phase vrm. Why would this be necessary? or even preferred? it seems like it would cut down on reliability and raise cost. If a 4 phase vrm can handle a 5870 chip at 150 watts why can't it handle all 8 asic chips at less than 100w

Why doesn't it look more like a video card anyways? Shouldn't the majority of the difference be less RAM, a usb port added and maybe a microprocessor to split the work among the 8 chips

what are the square blocks in the upper right? someone suggested capacitors. if so, why are there so many and such a big size. Its not like we are starting a big motor here.

On VRMs - this is the primary point of failure on *most* hardware, it might raise costs slightly to have multiples - but I think it's going to make for a better product in the long run - imagine 1 vrm fails, the others should still function only reducing the hashing by a percentage. Suppose one of 8 chips attached to a VRM fails, you'll probably end up frying the other chips.

It seems like they took the more expensive but more reliable route, started with a small single unit and added more of that module to the board.

[salfter]

All good memory makers give lifetime warranty.

have you ever had memory fail?

Yes...in fact, I just put in for an RMA with Crucial yesterday. Tried putting a stick I had laying around in my mining rig the other day. It locked up when I tried starting bitcoind, and kept either locking up or rebooting on fsck. Took it back out, fsck completed, and it's been OK since.

Before that, some memory in my work computer crapped out and needed replacement.

(Also, top-posting's bad, m'kay?)

[ice_chill]

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.

M

AMEN.

[defxor]

Electronics follow the bathtub failure model. Either they fail immediately, or after a very very long time. If you test the stuff before shipping you can be pretty much sure about the mean time before failure (mtbf).

Some electronics include moving parts. Those can fail pretty much at any time.

Some electronics are based on chemistry, like electrolyte caps. Those dry out in decades.

Some electronics have wear, think cells in an SSD with limited (although still in the thousands and tens of thousands) number of write cycles.

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.