Would i be better off waiting for the 16nm miners?

[jacobmayes94]

I have already decided to put my antminer U3 on for lottery mining, have named it blocky incase he finds me a block!... 63GH/s... I am interested in mining in a pool as well with a bigger rig as well... Would I be better off waiting for a later miner? I seem to find the antminer s7 is very high priced given the difficulty level keeps rising. I want to do it mainly for fun but also I do want to minimize losses if possible. Either getting a later rig or use that moment to cash in on the price drop of the s7?


What do you guys recommend? hang fire and wait? or go for it?

Jacob

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[notlist3d]

I have already decided to put my antminer U3 on for lottery mining, have named it blocky incase he finds me a block!... 63GH/s... I am interested in mining in a pool as well with a bigger rig as well... Would I be better off waiting for a later miner? I seem to find the antminer s7 is very high priced given the difficulty level keeps rising. I want to do it mainly for fun but also I do want to minimize losses if possible. Either getting a later rig or use that moment to cash in on the price drop of the s7?


What do you guys recommend? hang fire and wait? or go for it?

Jacob

This is really speculation.  No one can say if the S7 is a good investment compared to other companies.   It is no doubt their last 28 nm chip big machine (i think personally).  But it's going to take someone to release a better chip and miner to general public to push the new NM.

Honestly anyone is just guessing if they advise on wait or buy it.   Right now it's kinda a one man show on miners beings sold to public.

[QuintLeo]

I'd wait not so much on 16nm, but on "what other companies come out with to compete with the S7" right now.

Bitfury and KnC aren't going to be selling to the public, and BitFury in particular isn't going to be selling 16NM at all for months at best (they just announced tape-out earlier this month, it takes MORE months sometimes a year+ to get working production hardware from that point).

[mindtrip]

My opinion is we wont see any 16nm until 2016 so if you want to wait that long to get into mining or you take the S7 which as of right now is the best option available to the public

[ranochigo]

16nm miners are still in fact quite far away from a mass release. When it gets released, if the efficiency is high, the miner would be sold out in a fast rate. Even without it, the difficulty would increase as the time goes and it wouldn't gain too much profit.

[mindtrip]

16nm miners are still in fact quite far away from a mass release. When it gets released, if the efficiency is high, the miner would be sold out in a fast rate. Even without it, the difficulty would increase as the time goes and it wouldn't gain too much profit.

Agreed its basically an ASIC arms race each leap in efficency follows with a leap in difficulty to compensate so over all mining sooner rather then later in my onion is always the better option and forgetting the daily volatility of BTC the halving will come again and the rewards will once again be reduced and as the rest of the world jumps on board the value of BTC is poised to go up

[carlosmnk]

16nm miners are still in fact quite far away from a mass release. When it gets released, if the efficiency is high, the miner would be sold out in a fast rate. Even without it, the difficulty would increase as the time goes and it wouldn't gain too much profit.

Agreed its basically an ASIC arms race each leap in efficency follows with a leap in difficulty to compensate so over all mining sooner rather then later in my onion is always the better option and forgetting the daily volatility of BTC the halving will come again and the rewards will once again be reduced and as the rest of the world jumps on board the value of BTC is poised to go up

Agreed. I don't think there will be a 16nm miner in a while (some years, maybe). The develop cost is too much, and when it will be launched the diff will be launched too, so you will get no money. And next year, the reward will be only 12.5BTC per block, so i don't think we will see an early 16nm chip. Not in a long time. 

[mindtrip]

16nm miners are still in fact quite far away from a mass release. When it gets released, if the efficiency is high, the miner would be sold out in a fast rate. Even without it, the difficulty would increase as the time goes and it wouldn't gain too much profit.

Agreed its basically an ASIC arms race each leap in efficency follows with a leap in difficulty to compensate so over all mining sooner rather then later in my onion is always the better option and forgetting the daily volatility of BTC the halving will come again and the rewards will once again be reduced and as the rest of the world jumps on board the value of BTC is poised to go up

Agreed. I don't think there will be a 16nm miner in a while (some years, maybe). The develop cost is too much, and when it will be launched the diff will be launched too, so you will get no money. And next year, the reward will be only 12.5BTC per block, so i don't think we will see an early 16nm chip. Not in a long time. 

I also read that IBM built a chip at 7nm level but we wont see that int he chip market for at minimum 2 years and as always initial RD cost need to be recouped in the first year of chip production so i dotn see those chips hitting the mining industry for a few years after that its always been released by Intel first and even manufactured in house the first year to stall the Chinese from copying the design and mass producing it so the bitcoin miners are always 1-2 generations behind general intel desktop chip designs. Intel just released there 14nm chip but there previous generation Haswell-E chips still are the most powerful desktop chips on the market until the new technology catches up

[toptek]

wait to see what the S7 does i agree with them all 16 nm is so far off now , either buy some s5 or wait and see how the S7  really does and not the non-NDA reviews we are starting to see sense the NDA on S7 is no more and those few who  had a few sent to them are stating to give reviews i wouldn't trust.

I plan to get one and a few more S5 and will finally have my 240 lines put in the right way in about month, I can run all 10 of my miners at  once and feel safe 24/7. .



I Knew deve was going to slow down at some point it had to . so wait for reviews on the forums were they really mater or buy one or two now or buy Some S5 which will still have a use  for at least 6 month to a year or more because of the high cost of S 7

[jbrnt]

Any miner to be released in 2016 will be crossing over the halving around July in it's effective life. So I think price of miners are going down as we creep closer to the halving day as revenue from the miners will drop. I would not speculate price vs hash rate now because it's a completely new market in 6 months.

[toptek]

Any miner to be released in 2016 will be crossing over the halving around July in it's effective life. So I think price of miners are going down as we creep closer to the halving day as revenue from the miners will drop. I would not speculate price vs hash rate now because it's a completely new market in 6 months.

which will be nice i can't wait!!! .  I think nothing but positive  thought for that. .

[mindtrip]

Any miner to be released in 2016 will be crossing over the halving around July in it's effective life. So I think price of miners are going down as we creep closer to the halving day as revenue from the miners will drop. I would not speculate price vs hash rate now because it's a completely new market in 6 months.

which will be nice i can't wait!!! .  I think nothing but positive  thought for that. .

I agree I have some S7's coming in Tomorrow I will have them setup and running by end of day and as usual will post some of my pictures of the miners and the setup and after a few hours of running ill have an idea how they perform and what they have for OC potential.

I think the halving will push BTC price up and old legacy miner resale values down

[BLOCK_C]

It's probably going to be a while before the 16nm is out.  The base production price is very high and with BTC around 230 it's hard to justify the cost of switching to the new technology.  Bitmain will probably want to ride out their current chip for a while before making any sort of switches.  Also by the time it comes out the dynamic of the market could be very different than today so you could end up with a chip that runs at .12W/G and a global that 800Ph.

[mwizard]

I'd wait not so much on 16nm, but on "what other companies come out with to compete with the S7" right now.

Bitfury and KnC aren't going to be selling to the public, and BitFury in particular isn't going to be selling 16NM at all for months at best (they just announced tape-out earlier this month, it takes MORE months sometimes a year+ to get working production hardware from that point).

Agreed.

There are 16nm miners out there now.  It is just they are not available to the public.  KNC taped out its 16nm chip in February and announced they had chips workng in June (Solar chip).  This is presumably how KNC were able to add 10-15 Petahash to the network over the last 4 weeks.

Bitfury also have 16nm coming.

But neither company will sell to the general public.  

Companies aim to make a profit so will not sell miners if it is more profitable to use the miners themselves, or only sell to related large scale farms.

So 16nm miners are out there, just don't expect the latest technology miners to be sold to the public.  

[-droid-]

from what ive heard the 16nm chips are not that much more efficient than the 28nm fully custom BM1385

[mwizard]

from what ive heard the 16nm chips are not that much more efficient than the 28nm fully custom BM1385

droid, do you have a source for the comment that 16nm is not much more efficient than the 28nm BM1385.

All the sources I have seen say there is a considerable performance difference, especially with the 16 nanometer 3D FinFET chips. The target figures at the chip level being quoted by KNC and Bitfury are 0.07J/GHs and 0.06J/GHs respectively.  The BM1385 is 0.216J/GHs.  

Presumably only KNC knows the actual specs of the 16nm miners they seem to be rolling out.  The last 4 weeks have seen a 10-15 petahash  increase in the KNC pool.

In summary the 16nm chips could be between 2 and 3 times more efficient and likely around 0.1J/GHs at the system level.  But for the immediate future they will not be available to the public.

[-droid-]

from what ive heard the 16nm chips are not that much more efficient than the 28nm fully custom BM1385

droid, do you have a source for the comment that 16nm is not much more efficient than the 28nm BM1385.

All the sources I have seen say there is a considerable performance difference, especially with the 16 nanometer 3D FinFET chips. The target figures at the chip level being quoted by KNC and Bitfury are 0.07J/GHs and 0.06J/GHs respectively.  The BM1385 is 0.216J/GHs.  

Presumably only KNC knows the actual specs of the 16nm miners they seem to be rolling out.  The last 4 weeks have seen a 10-15 petahash  increase in the KNC pool.

In summary the 16nm chips could be between 2 and 3 times more efficient and likely around 0.1J/GHs at the system level.  But for the immediate future they will not be available to the public.

no sources, but ive heard from ppl who work at the local intel FAB that their 3D chips are having a prob with efficiency not being as good as they hoped.. plus the heat retention is nuts

[Mikestang]

OP,

You're in it for fun, you do not need bleeding edge ASIC technology.  You'll over pay for it both in purchase price and electricity usage (despite the increased efficiency, the trend with miners now is to go big big big, just look at the S5+, S7, and SP50).

Buy yourself a used S3 and start playing, you can find them almost given away now.  They are still fairly efficient, two of them can give you 1TH so they're "big enough" to put your U3 hash into perspective, and you won't break the bank playing with them.

[notlist3d]

Something interesting is SP50 is still 28nm.  So both bitmain and SP kept the 28nm for this release.

It could be a while till us customers see lower nm chips.   It seems most are getting one more generation out of the current nm.

[QuintLeo]

My opinion is we wont see any 16nm until 2016 so if you want to wait that long to get into mining or you take the S7 which as of right now is the best option available to the public

 December 2015, Lketc / Innosilicon, from reading between the lines of some of the stuff they've already announced.

 Pretty close to 2016 though - and it's not fully optimised 16nm so won't be better efficiency (per their announced specs) than the SP50 and only a hair better to the same as the S7.

 I'm mostly just hoping it ignites a serious price war.

 The KnC and Bitfury announcements were only for tapeout - though it appears they have done fully optimised designs, not "cell based" stuff that's less efficient.
 I suspect KnC has been rolling theirs for a short while, but are having yeild issues.
 Bitfury probably won't have production chips till sometime mid-to-late 2016.

 Spondoolies claims .15J/GHs for their new 28nm chips, which narrows the margin quite a bit but you better have SERIOUS money if you ever want any of that hardware.