Bitfury: "16nm... sales to public start shortly"

[NotFuzzyWarm]

I don't think we've communicated. I wasn't talking about a separate, discrete chip. I was talking about using a little free space (and maybe pins) on some larger chip with completely different purpose and market.<snip>

I agree on that point. The hard part would be to get the chip customer interested in bundling a mining circuit into said other use chips. I'd LOVE to see folks making chips for IoT jump on this. Last I heard the market will be several billion IoT chips this year. Shades of the BitFury light bulb or Bitmains AntRouter...

Cree and Phillips are already working on their LED bulbs acting as a light-based wireless link along with a WiFi circuit in them for lighting control. One step further is their using POE to not only communicate with the luminaries but also to power them. Gets around needing electricians to install the wiring and code restrictions on how/where the wiring is ran. To me that screams to put a miner in there! Of course, as a single bulb/miner it would hardly be worth the time to even setup a wallet for the 'income' but if you are talking about an entire building full of lights... Hmm.

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[toptek]

@dmwardjr


I don't know why you can't do that only problem i see it finding some one that will sell us some space and we need some one that is willing to design a chip etc .in a few month's i should have a few bitcoins saved up won't be much but some thing  and would be willing to invest them in some thing worth while, instead of buying a outdated miner the way it's benign to look.

 I'm sure a few others would, just to keep miners in the home etc .

[irritant]

I don't think we've communicated. I wasn't talking about a separate, discrete chip. I was talking about using a little free space (and maybe pins) on some larger chip with completely different purpose and market.<snip>

I agree on that point. The hard part would be to get the chip customer interested in bundling a mining circuit into said other use chips. I'd LOVE to see folks making chips for IoT jump on this. Last I heard the market will be several billion IoT chips this year. Shades of the BitFury light bulb or Bitmains AntRouter...

Cree and Phillips are already working on their LED bulbs acting as a light-based wireless link along with a WiFi circuit in them for lighting control. One step further is their using POE to not only communicate with the luminaries but also to power them. Gets around needing electricians to install the wiring and code restrictions on how/where the wiring is ran. To me that screams to put a miner in there! Of course, as a single bulb/miner it would hardly be worth the time to even setup a wallet for the 'income' but if you are talking about an entire building full of lights... Hmm.

what about an entire airport

http://www.newscenter.philips.com/main/standard/news/press/2015/20150416-philips-provides-light-as-a-service-to-schiphol-airport.wpd

[NotFuzzyWarm]

^^ Exactly!

[2112]

Well that sentence is the only thing that matters. Sure anyone can design an SHA core for "free" (which many people including hobbyists have done on this forum and elsewhere). I don't think anyone is saying it takes millions of R&D to layout a SHA core.

Getting that free core on usable silicon is all about those megabucks. No matter who you know or whether you a top level silicon engineer at Intel or AMD, you still need the couple million for that mask, minimum wafer order and packaging etc. to have a usable and sellable chip (and of course that dosent even cover the fact that SHA cores in the least chips are no longer just drop and place IP Blocks like they were when the first ASICS came out).

And the above is exactly a pitch from con man or somebody so naïve that is indistinguishable from a con man.

Bitcoin mining is full of chips designed by barely competent CAD monkeys. The access to capital is not sufficient to produce a worthwhile chip. It is the access to the required knowledge that is the differentiator.

Another symptom typical of a con man (or an equivalent naïf) is a reference to "drop and place IP blocks". No mining chip used such blocks for hashing engines. They may have contained IP blocks for e.g. clock generation PLL. But all the mining chips starting from the first ones by ASICMINER and BFL were custom RTL synthesized using standard-cell design flow. The differences in performance were mostly in the amount of tuning work done before the tapeout. That's why there's no valuable IP (intellectual property) in the masks for the obsolete chips (like Hashfast tried to sell). The intellectual property mostly consists of babysitting the toolchain through the iterations of the optimization process.

I've been there and done it. Many ASICs are designed and manufactured just for the purpose of copy protection and design security: to make coming to market with competitive product too expensive by eschewing anything off-the-shelf or available from a second source. From what I understand such nearly-empty chips are nowadays even more popular to hide the patent infringement amongst the completely bogus chip-space-filling circuits.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

<snip>
Bitcoin mining is full of chips designed by barely competent CAD monkeys. The access to capital is not sufficient to produce a worthwhile chip. It is the access to the required knowledge that is the differentiator.
<snip>
I've been there and done it. Many ASICs are designed and manufactured just for the purpose of copy protection and design security: to make coming to market with competitive product too expensive by eschewing anything off-the-shelf or available from a second source. From what I understand such nearly-empty chips are nowadays even more popular to hide the patent infringement amongst the completely bogus chip-space-filling circuits.

Agreed.
In my dealings long ago with the now infamous Joshua Zipkin of the AMT/Bitmine.ch mess, he mentioned that at the time there were only 2 people that led the designs of chips from ASICMINER, BFL and HashFast. He dinna name names but did say they collaborated and mainly used the different chips to test out their ideas on How To Do It and sold said companies on producing them. We know how well that went... BTC miner maker Cabal conspiracy theory? Don't know if it was true but ya gotta admit, all 3 companies by and large had the same issues in trying to get miners for the general public out the door . Considering chip performance they seemed more concerned on as fast as possible getting a chip that worked at all vs one properly tweaked to work well and to the pre-order specs.

re:IP protection, FTDI and their USB-RS232 converter chips comes to mind.One tweak they did to combat the flood of generic microcontroller (and cheaper) based converters was add an ID code and got MS to look for it when you run Win7 and higher. If not properly signed Winbloze refuse to use it. Grant you many of the counterfeit usb-rs232 adapters were crap and FTDI's *do* work better but still. 

[2112]

re:IP protection, FTDI and their USB-RS232 converter chips comes to mind.One tweak they did to combat the flood of generic microcontroller (and cheaper) based converters was add an ID code and got MS to look for it when you run Win7 and higher. If not properly signed Winbloze refuse to use it. Grant you many of the counterfeit usb-rs232 adapters were crap and FTDI's *do* work better but still. 

Yeah, this is a good point to emphasize. There were several counterfeit FTDI chips. All of them used much larger and more complex SoC chips with single fixed program to emulate the real FTDI. The large SoCs were cheaper because they were manufactured in much larger quantities and had multiple competing sources.

The main value of the real FTDI's is in their much higher immunity to noise and clever design that allows for much lower bit error rates. But many designs completely waste that additional functionality. One example probably known here would be ngzhang's ICARUS board (dual Spartan 6) where he simply wouldn't bother to route any signals beyond the minimum of RxD and TxD to the FPGA. This is the reason why all the Icarus-compatible miners have so much reliability problems with the communication between the chips and software.

Trying to understand why the counterfeit using 10-100 times more gates than the real chip is cheaper than the original is a good introduction to the financial aspect of semiconductor manufacturing. Much better than throwing nearly random megabucks imaginary costs.

[dmwardjr]

@dmwardjr


I don't know why you can't do that only problem i see it finding some one that will sell us some space and we need some one that is willing to design a chip etc .in a few month's i should have a few bitcoins saved up won't be much but some thing  and would be willing to invest them in some thing worth while, instead of buying a outdated miner the way it's benign to look.

 I'm sure a few others would, just to keep miners in the home etc .

I willing to invest up to about $40K for starters if I knew we could have a damn good product with excellent efficiency that would be in the mix for quite a while.  When I say efficient, I'm talking about 0.06 watts per GH/s or better.  If we had a rig with 16nm chips and that kind of efficiency, I'm game.  We just need a lot more investors it sounds like.  I don't even want to start a thread on this to begin anything like this and put all the effort into sending hundreds of PM's out to people to market it to them if it's not possible for that kind of efficiency and/or coordination.

It's also important to have this done in a way that protects everyone's investment.  I mentioned earlier that if the money needed to get it moving was not accomplished within a certain time frame, there needs to be a means of everyone being able to get their money back.

It would take more than just me getting the word out.  I know I sent out hundreds of emails to get people to point their rigs to CK/Kano Pool a couple of months ago.  I got quite a bit of people to come over.  They too talked to people to get them to come over.  People have to be willing to invest the time to send out PM's to get it going.  However, FIRST, I need to know it CAN be done and A PLAN has to be put together to explain [To would be investors] HOW things would be accomplished, WHO will accomplish WHAT and WHEN.  It will take some coordination, for sure.

EDIT:  People have to be chosen who will maintain contact with people and institutions throughout every phase of the design, development and manufacturing.  Many things to consider and coordinate.

[sidehack]

I still would like to know how much would be required to get a 16nm design to engineering samples.

[dmwardjr]

I still would like to know how much would be required to get a 16nm design to engineering samples.

same here.

[dmwardjr]

Now, I'm only throwing ideas out for people to brainstorm.

We could make it where ALL investors are owners of the crowd fund.  The percentage one owns depends on the amount they invest.  Rules need to be set up so that NO ONE ever has 51% or higher ownership.

Also, we would need to create something where those who invest MUST continue to put in a certain percentage of their earnings from mining back into the fund each month.  For example, maybe 3 to 5 percent should go back into the fund.  If they invested $100, they need to put back $3 to $5 every month into the fund every month for continued product development and to continue manufacturing.  It may be that 10% would need to go back into the fund every month.  I'm simply trying to throw out a number to for those who purchased ownership of a rig to continue their ownership in the company.  They can sell their ownership to someone else if they like.  If someone gets behind on their monthly dues for product development and manufacturing, they can no longer expect to have access to future gear that is created by the company of the crowd fund.

I'm throwing out ideas to try to keep something going if we are able to start it.  I don't want it to simply be a one time thing.  I want it to keep going and grow.

This would also mean people would have to be chosen to run "support" if issues should arise.  There needs to be a place to house the gear before shipment; for support; for repairs; etc...  Quite a bit to consider.  I would like to get something like this going if many with the contacts and the knowhow can work together to try to get this done.

EDIT:  The minimum investment might have to be like $500 or $800.  I'm not sure.  We would have to determine that number.  I simply used $100 for easy math.  If we could create a 16nm rig with 10 TH/s at 0.06 watts per GH/s at $800 cost per rig, it would ROI relatively quickly at current price of bitcoin and difficulty.

So, we would basically have to come up with a ball park figure of how much a 8 to 10 TH/s rig would be at cost for development, parts and manufacturing.  Each individual would be responsible for shipping to their location, any customs charges, VAT, etc...

I'm basically saying the minimum investment would be the cost for one rig.  The individual who made that investment also owns part of the crowd fund AS LONG AS they continue paying monthly dues for continued product development and manufacturing.  It may be we could make it 20% of their initial investment.  If they want to invest more as time goes along to get more rigs, that is fine too.  I'm just brain storming trying to figure out how to do this.

[MarkAz]

Also, we would need to create something where those who invest MUST continue to put in a certain percentage of their earnings from mining back into the fund each month.  For example, maybe 3 to 5 percent should go back into the fund.  If they invested $100, they need to put back $3 to $5 every month into the fund every month for continued product development and to continue manufacturing.  It may be that 10% would need to go back into the fund every month.  I'm simply trying to throw out a number to for those who purchased ownership of a rig to continue their ownership in the company.  They can sell their ownership to someone else if they like.  If someone gets behind on their monthly dues for product development and manufacturing, they can no longer expect to have access to future gear that is created by the company of the crowd fund.

Interesting idea, but logistically this would be really challenging to do - although one way you COULD do it would be if you developed a miner, and didn't release the driver as open source, and basically built a special version of the cgminer/bfgminer that was locked to a particular pool - and just make the pool fees that fund reinvestment.  Then there's no bother trying to enforce it, and even if you sold the gear, the new owner would still be contributing to the 'cause' so to speak.  This would also solve the issues of predictable cashflow for the parent company...  Hell, the pool could even be public, and people could mine into 'equity' positions even using other gear.  Use the infrastructure that already exists...

[dmwardjr]

Interesting idea, but logistically this would be really challenging to do - although one way you COULD do it would be if you developed a miner, and didn't release the driver as open source, and basically built a special version of the cgminer/bfgminer that was locked to a particular pool - and just make the pool fees that fund reinvestment.  Then there's no bother trying to enforce it, and even if you sold the gear, the new owner would still be contributing to the 'cause' so to speak.  This would also solve the issues of predictable cashflow for the parent company...  Hell, the pool could even be public, and people could mine into 'equity' positions even using other gear.  Use the infrastructure that already exists...

I like that idea too.  I would make a nomination for CK/Kano Pool to be that pool and they would probably be wiling to develop that special version of cgminer just for their pool at no cost.  They would be getting paid for their contribution by having more rigs on their pool finding more blocks, etc...  Hell, I would even send them a contribution for their time and effort.

[2112]

I still would like to know how much would be required to get a 16nm design to engineering samples.

same here.

All of it, I mean all that you can come up with. You have this big target painted over your faces: I want to buy Bitcoin turboencabulators, I'm ignorant of the technology, please rip me off.

Cypherdoc was exactly like you, he was ripped off on his Bitcoin turboencabulators by Hashfast, but actually made money by shilling and roping more naïfs.

There are three ways of getting something done:

1) learn how to do it and do it yourselves;
2) learn who can do it for you and for how much, then pay it;
3) prohibit your teenage children from doing it, and hope they will turn like all teenagers and do what's prohibited.

What I see in both of you is the strong desire to not learn anything about logic design and the semiconductor industry. Sidehack is one step ahead, because he is at least openly willing to admit that he won't do it.

You are like two guys who want to win competitive dance or acrobatic event, but don't want to get their asses off the lazy chair. Learn how to walk and tap your feet with the music before you sign up in a competitive event.

Edit: anyone here remembers that guy who was claiming to develop ASIC simultaneously with BFL? I forgot his handle on this forum. He was hiring people for the assembly and shipping departments, rented the premises, but his RTL wasn't even through the simulation stage.

Edit2: All right, I've found it: it was cablepair. He successfully shipped ModMiner (somebody's else FPGA design) and failed to deliver bASIC, but returned at least some of the collected money. That was about 2012. Now we have 2016 and another experienced telephone technician is trying to start another fabless ASIC boutique.

Edit3: Maybe somebody remembers who was that Arab guy living in England with experience in fashion for Islamic women? He was also trying to do the same.

[dmwardjr]

I still would like to know how much would be required to get a 16nm design to engineering samples.

same here.

All of it, I mean all that you can come up with. You have this big target painted over your faces: I want to buy Bitcoin turboencabulators, I'm ignorant of the technology, please rip me off.

Cypherdoc was exactly like you, he was ripped off on his Bitcoin turboencabulators by Hashfast, but actually made money by shilling and roping more naïfs.

There are three ways of getting something done:

1) learn how to do it and do it yourselves;
2) learn who can do it for you and for how much, then pay it;
3) prohibit your teenage children from doing it, and hope they will turn like all teenagers and do what's prohibited.

What I see in both of you is the strong desire to not learn anything about logic design and the semiconductor industry. Sidehack is one step ahead, because he is at least openly willing to admit that he won't do it.

You are like two guys who want to win competitive dance or acrobatic event, but don't want to get their asses off the lazy chair. Learn how to walk and tap your feet with the music before you sign up in a competitive event.

Fine, I can take that medicine.  Sounds like it's time to do research and homework.  Then try to come up with the funds one way or another.

[sidehack]

Perhaps it's time to start a new thread for this line of discussion.

I haven't said I won't learn how to do it. I'm just saying that's not in my skill set. Given a chip, I can build a miner around it. Literally every part of a miner except the silicon design (including power, controls, driver code, what have you) is something I already know I can do. But I'm not going to assume there isn't someone who already knows what he's doing and can do it better - and certainly in less time, which matters a heck of a lot in the bitcoin world. I intend someday on working on silicon design, and I already have some ideas what I'd try and make. But I'd prefer to start on something quite a bit less intense than something 16nm running 500MHz.

[dmwardjr]

Anyone have an online class they recommend for designing chips?  If there are certain things I cannot learn unless I'm in a classroom environment, let me know and I won't waste my time trying to learn online but do my research of a college here locally in Birmingham to take specific classes needed for what I want to accomplish.  I don't need a degree; only the knowledge with some experience.

It sounds like an ASIC for bitcoin mining is relatively simple compared to other applications after reading this subject in other threads.  I just want to take the time to learn it myself.

[dmwardjr]

Perhaps it's time to start a new thread for this line of discussion.

I haven't said I won't learn how to do it. I'm just saying that's not in my skill set. Given a chip, I can build a miner around it. Literally every part of a miner except the silicon design (including power, controls, driver code, what have you) is something I already know I can do. But I'm not going to assume there isn't someone who already knows what he's doing and can do it better - and certainly in less time, which matters a heck of a lot in the bitcoin world. I intend someday on working on silicon design, and I already have some ideas what I'd try and make. But I'd prefer to start on something quite a bit less intense than something 16nm running 500MHz.

I totally agree with you, Sir.  I was simply trying to help with marketing and coordinating to try to get things moving with others who already have the know how.  Instead, I'm told by someone who appears to have the knowhow to do one of 3 things.   lol  

At least I know NOW not to waste my time with them.  I would probably end up getting taken advantage of out of spite now.  I was simply trying to offer my time, energy and money to help them and others get something done.  Plain and simple...

[kilo17]

I would love to be involved with getting an ASIC built, but I am realistic about the chance of being successful- I would say it is about the similar chance as finding a block with a Compac. 

There are so many other viable options for far less money and far less risk.  In my humble opinion if you are unable to speculate on the difficulty and network hash at the time you are done with the project then how would you know if you will not end up making an ASIC with no where to play.

I would suggest fund raising and getting about $250-500,000 and then approaching Bitfury or 21inc and buying chips.  Sure they asks for $1 million but if you wave $500,000 it will certainly catch some attention.  A lot of great things can be done with others chips and often better than the manufacturer.  Look at the S5 efficiency vs the Compac efficiency.

Cheers

[2112]

Interesting idea, but logistically this would be really challenging to do - although one way you COULD do it would be if you developed a miner, and didn't release the driver as open source, and basically built a special version of the cgminer/bfgminer that was locked to a particular pool - and just make the pool fees that fund reinvestment.  Then there's no bother trying to enforce it, and even if you sold the gear, the new owner would still be contributing to the 'cause' so to speak.  This would also solve the issues of predictable cashflow for the parent company...  Hell, the pool could even be public, and people could mine into 'equity' positions even using other gear.  Use the infrastructure that already exists...

Somewhat naïve, but at least doable. Essentially 21 Inc's mining chip works like that, but designed by somebody more experienced in DRM (digital rights management).