Butterfly Labs is going to give lifetime warranty

[Bogart]

These ASIC mining offerings are 1st-gen designs, rushed to market, because time is money in this game.

I'm sure there is lots of room for improvement in subsequent generations.  Process size is the most obvious area.  All of the makers who have stated their feature size are using 130nm or 110nm.

There is likely also room for improvement in the SHA256 IP cores themselves, and in their management by the supervisory mining logic.

It's not so much about the Gh/$ or Gh/chip as it is about Gh/J.

[Soros Shorts]

So do people think some day we can buy SHA-256 IP cores from anybody, kind of like the 8051?

[mrb]

It is already possible to buy SHA256 IP cores. But none of them on the market are optimized for mining, hence why Bitcoin mining vendors presumably developed their owns.

[scrybe]

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

All good memory makers give lifetime warranty.

Yes, I've lost about 1% of the RAM I buy for our data center, sometimes it just stops or starts corrupting data and has to be replaced. At home I've had a few sticks fail over the years, but the last one was 1st generation BGA PC150, so I've been luckier recently. 

FYI, if you have random crashes that don't trace back to drivers, try some different RAM, you might be surprised.

[Syke]

There is no loophole.

Of course there's a loophole. Here it is:

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showwiki.php?title=FAQ:What+is+the+warranty+period+on+your+devices&highlight=lifetime

Lifetime is defined as the length of time we are manufacturing that product.

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showwiki.php?title=FAQ:What+is+the+warranty+period+on+your+devices&do=comments

Once we stop producing a product, the warranty will no longer apply

World's shortest "lifetime warranty". You'll get one year out of it, tops.

[SgtSpike]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

[greyhawk]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

But then people would know what's up and no one would be fooled.

[crazyates]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

Lifetime of the product, not your lifetime.

[bcpokey]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

Lifetime of the product, not your lifetime.

Lifetime of the product line. Lifetime of the product would actually be an even smarter and more evil Warranty...

"Hey my product broke but it's under lifetime warranty so please replace it"

"Sorry Sir, lifetime warranty means the lifetime of the product, since your product is now technically dead, that means the warranty has expired"

Regardless we should stop using Lifetime warranties, as it is misleading, doubly so in an industry that will have ridiculously short product line lifetimes.

[Bogart]

"Sorry Sir, lifetime warranty means the lifetime of the product, since your product is now technically dead, that means the warranty has expired"

"aaaand it`s gone! this line is for people with the money only please step aside!"

[SgtSpike]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

Lifetime of the product, not your lifetime.

Bowtech.  Thus far, the ONLY company I know of with TRUE lifetime warranties.  Bought a bow in 2001 that the limbs broke?  Well here, we'll either fix it with limbs we still have in stock, or we'll give you a brand new bow of our latest and greatest!

That's how a lifetime warranty should be.

[crazyates]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

Lifetime of the product, not your lifetime.

Bowtech.  Thus far, the ONLY company I know of with TRUE lifetime warranties.  Bought a bow in 2001 that the limbs broke?  Well here, we'll either fix it with limbs we still have in stock, or we'll give you a brand new bow of our latest and greatest!

That's how a lifetime warranty should be.

Seems to me that all sorts of hunting gear is like that. My friend has got a pair of LL Bean hiking boots that he's in all the time. He brings them in when they're worn, ripped, anything, and they replace 'em. My dad's got a Buck knife with a true lifetime warranty - he's had it for 15 years that he keeps sending in to get sharpened, new hinge, new release, etc.

Idk why, but electronics just aren't like that.

[SgtSpike]

Figures... how come lifetime warranties never actually last a lifetime?  They should be called product life warranties.

Lifetime of the product, not your lifetime.

Bowtech.  Thus far, the ONLY company I know of with TRUE lifetime warranties.  Bought a bow in 2001 that the limbs broke?  Well here, we'll either fix it with limbs we still have in stock, or we'll give you a brand new bow of our latest and greatest!

That's how a lifetime warranty should be.

Seems to me that all sorts of hunting gear is like that. My friend has got a pair of LL Bean hiking boots that he's in all the time. He brings them in when they're worn, ripped, anything, and they replace 'em. My dad's got a Buck knife with a true lifetime warranty - he's had it for 15 years that he keeps sending in to get sharpened, new hinge, new release, etc.

Idk why, but electronics just aren't like that.

Well, probably because electronics are only truly useful for a short period of time, then people would purposefully break them to get a newer/better model.  But companies should not call it a lifetime warranty if it only covers the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the person.

[greyhawk]

Well, probably because electronics are only truly useful for a short period of time, then people would purposefully break them to get a newer/better model. 

People already routinely do that, where they "accidentally drop" a friends smartphone, then ask their insurance to pay for that friends new phone.

[SgtSpike]

Well, probably because electronics are only truly useful for a short period of time, then people would purposefully break them to get a newer/better model. 

People already routinely do that, where they "accidentally drop" a friends smartphone, then ask their insurance to pay for that friends new phone.

Exactly.  The abuse would be far greater if lifetime warranties were truly for the lifetime of the person.  People would stash away old, unused electronics in their closets, then find them years later and think, "hmmm, if I just laid a screwdriver across this circuit board while the device was turned on, I bet it would stop working and I could send it in to get the latest model!"

There are ways to somewhat prevent this, with water-detecting stickers on the insides of electronics and tamper-proof warranty stickers on the casings, but I'm sure I could kill just about any electronic device without raising any of those flags fairly easily.

So, I can understand why electronics companies do not offer true lifetime warranties, but STOP CALLING IT A LIFETIME WARRANTY!

[crazyates]

Well, probably because electronics are only truly useful for a short period of time, then people would purposefully break them to get a newer/better model. 

People already routinely do that, where they "accidentally drop" a friends smartphone, then ask their insurance to pay for that friends new phone.

Do you know how many phones I've returned just because I borked it up while messing around with the software? One time a busybox update got screwed up, and I just returned it for a new one rather than messing around with it. I love Radio Shack warranties.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Well, probably because electronics are only truly useful for a short period of time, then people would purposefully break them to get a newer/better model. 

People already routinely do that, where they "accidentally drop" a friends smartphone, then ask their insurance to pay for that friends new phone.

Do you know how many phones I've returned just because I borked it up while messing around with the software? One time a busybox update got screwed up, and I just returned it for a new one rather than messing around with it. I love Radio Shack warranties.

Craftsman tools also come to mind.

[ldrgn]

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.

What you're describing is certainly possible but I don't think it is practical for BFL and I'm surprised nobody else in this thread has called you out on it yet.  They're making small batches of a niche product - there is no big volume here.  The "switch a core off if it didn't work" model is only really practical if you're making chips by the boatload.  BFL needs a low chip failure rate to survive.

[2112]

What you're describing is certainly possible but I don't think it is practical for BFL and I'm surprised nobody else in this thread has called you out on it yet.  They're making small batches of a niche product - there is no big volume here.  The "switch a core off if it didn't work" model is only really practical if you're making chips by the boatload.  BFL needs a low chip failure rate to survive.

Please remember, that the mining software doesn't access the hashing chip directly, but through the the secret firmware. There will be no need for expensive lasering or fusing on the die. Just the firmware has to have a bitmap of the verified working hashers. So the whole situation is very different from the things like CPUs with whole sections of them disabled at the hardware level, because BFL can disable the defective cores at the level equivalent to BIOS.

I'm also assuming that they didn't do fully-unrolled hashers, but much smaller, iterative ones. Therefore I assumed that the chip will have at multiple tens or even hundreds of hashing cores.

On the FPGAs the hashers were unrolled primarily because the deficiency in the place-and-route software heurisics: for the rolled designs the P&R failed to converge or produced spectacularly bad layouts. ASIC designers use way more advanced layout-optimization software.

[Bogart]

Remember, the cores don't need to operate perfectly.

The occasional false positive or false negative will not really impact things much when it comes to mining.