[Announcement] Avalon ASIC Development Status [Batch #1]

[DoomDumas]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

A mining rig of 500MH/s today have 1/40000 of network power a single 60GH ASIC at the beginning will be near 1/2000 (like a 2GH today) and a 1TB rig will be in the 1/100th range like a small pool today (30-40GHs of today rigs); pool still can work, but it's quite easy for who have 2-3 60GH ASIC mine in solo and get 1-2 block a month in the first month.

Maybe Im wrong, but mining on a pool or solo would get almost the same result, even in a few month time span...   your tought ?

[Bogart]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

A mining rig of 500MH/s today have 1/40000 of network power a single 60GH ASIC at the beginning will be near 1/2000 (like a 2GH today) and a 1TB rig will be in the 1/100th range like a small pool today (30-40GHs of today rigs); pool still can work, but it's quite easy for who have 2-3 60GH ASIC mine in solo and get 1-2 block a month in the first month.

Maybe Im wrong, but mining on a pool or solo would get almost the same result, even in a few month time span...   your tought ?

I don't understand why so many people are confused about this.

Yes, statistically it should work out exactly the same.  Solo just tends to be a lot more "chunky" in its payouts.

(minus any variance based on server reliability, server operator fees, etc.)

[Aseras]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

All the major pools now won't support an ASIC. There has to be major changes for them to support ASIC. Especially at the beginning when ASIC are returning easy work extremely fast. Even with stratum there's going to be major bandwidth problems in the beginning.

[Inaba]

That would not be true.  EMC, BTCguild, Slush and Eligius are all ready and waiting for ASIC.

[ercolinux]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

A mining rig of 500MH/s today have 1/40000 of network power a single 60GH ASIC at the beginning will be near 1/2000 (like a 2GH today) and a 1TB rig will be in the 1/100th range like a small pool today (30-40GHs of today rigs); pool still can work, but it's quite easy for who have 2-3 60GH ASIC mine in solo and get 1-2 block a month in the first month.

Maybe Im wrong, but mining on a pool or solo would get almost the same result, even in a few month time span...   your tought ?

I don't understand why so many people are confused about this.

Yes, statistically it should work out exactly the same.  Solo just tends to be a lot more "chunky" in its payouts.

(minus any variance based on server reliability, server operator fees, etc.)

If your hash rate is very high mining in solo is more convenient: you don't have the fees to pay to pool and you get also all the transaction fee. On the long run even with the variance in payouts you can easily earn a 2-5% more with solo mining.

[pieppiep]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

All the major pools now won't support an ASIC. There has to be major changes for them to support ASIC. Especially at the beginning when ASIC are returning easy work extremely fast. Even with stratum there's going to be major bandwidth problems in the beginning.

Why is the 1kB/s (regardless of miningspeed) a major bandwidth problem?

[Soros Shorts]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

All the major pools now won't support an ASIC. There has to be major changes for them to support ASIC. Especially at the beginning when ASIC are returning easy work extremely fast. Even with stratum there's going to be major bandwidth problems in the beginning.

Why is the 1kB/s (regardless of miningspeed) a major bandwidth problem?

If there were a period where a block was solved once every 5 seconds (just making this number up) until difficulty caught up I am guessing that there could be a temporary network congestion problem. Mining might only be 1kB/s but block propagation could take up a large chunk of network bandwidth. You could see p2pool-like problems manfesting on the main Bitcoin network, the major one being collisions of solved blocks that will result in many orphans. This wouldn't be a pool issue, though.

[pieppiep]

Why would the pools disappear?
If someone mines with a single gpu now and has 1/10000th of the total networkspeed and gets a asic and still has a 1/10000th of the total networkspeed, it's still a good idea to use a pool.

All the major pools now won't support an ASIC. There has to be major changes for them to support ASIC. Especially at the beginning when ASIC are returning easy work extremely fast. Even with stratum there's going to be major bandwidth problems in the beginning.

Why is the 1kB/s (regardless of miningspeed) a major bandwidth problem?

If there were a period where a block was solved once every 5 seconds (just making this number up) until difficulty caught up I am guessing that there could be a temporary network congestion problem. Mining might only be 1kB/s but block propagation could take up a large chunk of network bandwidth. You could see p2pool-like problems manfesting on the main Bitcoin network, the major one being collisions of solved blocks that will result in many orphans. This wouldn't be a pool issue, though.

5 seconds a block won't be a big problem because it won't generate extra transactions. Each block will be the 80 bytes header with a little data for the block reward, at most 1/4kB.
There probably won't even be much collisions because I really doubt an increase of 100k of speed will come at once from multiple sources.

5 seconds a block takes at most 2016 * 5 = 10080 seconds = 2 hours 48 minutes to change the difficulty to 20 seconds a block. (maximum increase is times 4)

[BitSyncom]

Most pool can queried for 120 getworks at a time, noticeably the ecoinpool variant. With other new systems like Stratum with aims to solve any other potential problem and future proofing the network.

In addition, like I have previously stated, Avalon will be releasing our image.iso for the controller sometime in December this will include documentation on how our ASIC will communicate with mining softwares and pools. we will also be providing patches to opensource miners like CGminer.

With that said, we are aware of this bandwidth concern and do not deem it to be a problem at the moment.

[Aseras]

That would not be true.  EMC, BTCguild, Slush and Eligius are all ready and waiting for ASIC.

No one knows if they are ready because no one has a working asic to test.

The BFL singles had issues with pools and clients when they first came out. They still don't work well with p2pool because of how the bitstream works.

Asic are basically just hardcoded fpga, but faster. No one really knows yet exactly what hiccups there will be, but I think for the first few weeks after they hit it's going to be very interesting and very bumpy.

The majority of the asics save the japalepeno? are going to be multithreaded or appear as a multi gpu/asic device, so each device is going to request several works at once and return several at once, hundreds or thousands of times faster than now. Even with stratum and nrolltime allowing the miner to save requesting and generate it's own work, they have to go back up to a pool and get confirmed. It's going to be interesting

[Inaba]

Heh.. if you say so!

[Aseras]

Heh.. if you say so!

well hurry up and build a working asic so we will all know already. Stop farking off in the forums and start soldering or cursing at someone in mandarin

[squeept]

Heh.. if you say so!

well hurry up and build a working asic so we will all know already. Stop farking off in the forums and start soldering or cursing at someone in mandarin

I'm sending Inaba a care package of the mandarin Rosetta Stone and a used Weller hobby iron. Do work, son.

[gmaxwell]

No one knows if they are ready because no one has a working asic to test.
The BFL singles had issues with pools and clients when they first came out. They still don't work well with p2pool because of how the bitstream works.

It's quite easy (two lines changed or so) to modify pool software to accept 'difficulty 0' shares, and a regular cpu miner to consider every attempt a winner.. by doing this you can produce rates enormously faster than any asic.  If you're board its only a few more lines changed to fork testnet or bitcoin and mine a bunch of fake blocks to test the whole system. 

There may be some burps in practice but you can certainly get some reasonable testing in.

[eldentyrell]

They've admitted to using a larger die size than their competitors.

Link?  I haven't seen anything from them regarding die size, but I haven't been following too closely.

I'm also worried by their refusal to say how many chips are in the 60GH/s device.  I count at least five people asking in this thread and still no answer.

[crazyates]

They've admitted to using a larger die size than their competitors.

Link?  I haven't seen anything from them regarding die size, but I haven't been following too closely.

I'm also worried by their refusal to say how many chips are in the 60GH/s device.  I count at least five people asking in this thread and still no answer.

Dude, he listed that information in the very first post of this thread: 110nm.

Code:

Chip Specification
Technology Summary:
    TSMC 0.11- micron G process

He has previously posted that they would be using either 110nm or 130nm, but confirmed the details here.

[MrTeal]

They've admitted to using a larger die size than their competitors.

Link?  I haven't seen anything from them regarding die size, but I haven't been following too closely.

I'm also worried by their refusal to say how many chips are in the 60GH/s device.  I count at least five people asking in this thread and still no answer.

Dude, he listed that information in the very first post of this thread: 110nm.

Code:

Chip Specification
Technology Summary:
    TSMC 0.11- micron G process

He has previously posted that they would be using either 110nm or 130nm, but confirmed the details here.

Die size isn't the process node, it's how physically large the die is. IE, 5mmx5mm or 25mm^2, something like that.

[crazyates]

They've admitted to using a larger die size than their competitors.

Link?  I haven't seen anything from them regarding die size, but I haven't been following too closely.

I'm also worried by their refusal to say how many chips are in the 60GH/s device.  I count at least five people asking in this thread and still no answer.

Dude, he listed that information in the very first post of this thread: 110nm.

Code:

Chip Specification
Technology Summary:
    TSMC 0.11- micron G process

He has previously posted that they would be using either 110nm or 130nm, but confirmed the details here.

Die size isn't the process node, it's how physically large the die is. IE, 5mmx5mm or 25mm^2, something like that.

My bad. /facepalm

[crazyates]

Code:

Chip Specification
Technology Summary:

Packaged Chip Size: 7 mm x 7 mm

?

[Cablez]

Code:

Chip Specification
Technology Summary:

Packaged Chip Size: 7 mm x 7 mm

?

That would be the fully packaged chip size. The die size would be a fraction of that in ex. 5x5mm or so.