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

[smracer]

I think Bitfury is talking about their next group of wafers.  They obviously have deployed the first groups of wafers as they are now 18% of the hashrate.

Unless they just frantically hooked up hundreds of Petahashes of their older technology that was just sitting around right before they get their new chips, which makes little sense to me.

I only hope they plan on selling a big chunk of the next batch of wafers to the public and not keeping all that hashrate for themselves.

Nothing would be worse for bitcoin than thousands of home miners "rage-quitting" and selling all their coins.

[sidehack]

I know nothing about chip design. I'd lean on NotFuzzyWarm and 2112, guys like that, for proper silicon. As it is, all I can do is try and design boards around existing chips. Hopefully the Bitfury chip is still worth working with once it's actually available.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

ask sidehack or  NotFuzzyWarm  they both do design etc and can give some kind of ball park I think . yea we can't leave out the Home miner , i think even if i didn't mine my self at home, i would agree to.

I thought they may have only worked with chips other people engineered and designed.  I didn't know they too can engineer and design chips themselves.  I'll give them a shout to ask some questions.

You thought correctly. I don't do chip design, I'm purely a hardware guy. However, most of the companies my company supports *are* in the semi industry ergo my knowledge of where the chip mfg processes comes from. Our end of things is tightly integrated to what size nodes the Foundries can produce.

That said, I can tell you it is a fact that you are looking at several million $ to develop a chip from scratch. Even when using foundry or design house supplied pre-made IP blocks, TSMC will not even talk to you about 16nm chips unless the chip quantities are over 100k/month...  Push back to 20-22nm and higher and they are much more approachable but that is also outside our target.

[dmwardjr]

ask sidehack or  NotFuzzyWarm  they both do design etc and can give some kind of ball park I think . yea we can't leave out the Home miner , i think even if i didn't mine my self at home, i would agree to.

I thought they may have only worked with chips other people engineered and designed.  I didn't know they too can engineer and design chips themselves.  I'll give them a shout to ask some questions.

You thought correctly. I don't do chip design, I'm purely a hardware guy. However, most of the companies my company supports *are* in the semi industry ergo my knowledge of where the chip mfg processes comes from. Our end of things is tightly integrated to what size nodes the Foundries can produce.

That said, I can tell you it is a fact that you are looking at several million $ to develop a chip from scratch. Even when using foundry or design house supplied pre-made IP blocks, TSMC will not even talk to you about 16nm chips unless the chip quantities are over 100k/month...  Push back to 20-22nm and higher and they are much more approachable but that is also outside our target.

Bummer...   Damn damn damn damn...

Thanks for your input.

[dmwardjr]

I know nothing about chip design. I'd lean on NotFuzzyWarm and 2112, guys like that, for proper silicon. As it is, all I can do is try and design boards around existing chips. Hopefully the Bitfury chip is still worth working with once it's actually available.

I sent you a PM but you, NotFuzzyWarm, and 2112 have basically answered my question.

[toptek]

my mistake misunderstood .

[2112]

Certainly, we as a community, can come together to figure out a way to do this.  No?

Well, the answer to your rhetorical question is now obvious: NO.

This is a high technology endeavor: armies of electrical technicians, screwdriver artists and soldering masters can't overcome the advantage of a single logic design engineer backed with appropriate design toolset and the capital to manufacture it.

The last chances for "community effort" was in the FPGA era. They didn't work out.

Bunch of tightwads, skinflints and associated naïfs don't make a "community". They are just fodder to be exploited by the more knowledgeable.

The reality of electronic industry (in general) and coin mining niche (in particular) is brutal to some. I would just call it "normal", "typical" to any technological endeavors.

[dmwardjr]

You thought correctly. I don't do chip design, I'm purely a hardware guy. However, most of the companies my company supports *are* in the semi industry ergo my knowledge of where the chip mfg processes comes from. Our end of things is tightly integrated to what size nodes the Foundries can produce.

That said, I can tell you it is a fact that you are looking at several million $ to develop a chip from scratch. Even when using foundry or design house supplied pre-made IP blocks, TSMC will not even talk to you about 16nm chips unless the chip quantities are over 100k/month...  Push back to 20-22nm and higher and they are much more approachable but that is also outside our target.

If a rig was designed and manufactured with [for example] 100 x 16nm chips, that would be 1,000 rigs each month for 100k quantities a month.

How much per chip do you think would be your estimate if we were able to get the 100k per month.

Also, I'm sure they would want us to purchase 100k/month for a certain length of time.  Would it be like 6 months minimum or 12 months?

I'm just trying to get an idea for the cost of the chips alone over a certain length of time (6 months to 12 months).

[toptek]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plant

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made


I had those links bookmarked in water fox i forgot about i have a few videos i found on utube that explains a lot, i sub to .

[2112]

You thought correctly. I don't do chip design, I'm purely a hardware guy. However, most of the companies my company supports *are* in the semi industry ergo my knowledge of where the chip mfg processes comes from. Our end of things is tightly integrated to what size nodes the Foundries can produce.

That said, I can tell you it is a fact that you are looking at several million $ to develop a chip from scratch. Even when using foundry or design house supplied pre-made IP blocks, TSMC will not even talk to you about 16nm chips unless the chip quantities are over 100k/month...  Push back to 20-22nm and higher and they are much more approachable but that is also outside our target.

Here's my take on the cost:

The hashing engine is so small that one could get it developed and samples manufactured for free in the small corner of some bigger project. The mega-dollar capital outlay would be required only in the final stage of mass-production. The semiconductor foundries routinely "waste" much more chip real estate on various testing structures.

So why nobody did that? My limited experience shows that the prospective market is so filled out with liars, bullshit artists, con men, mythomaniacs and associated naïfs (that are honest, but completely indistinguishable for the former classes) that  it is completely not worth the effort. The only way to do it is as an intellectual curiosity (in secret) or when from the start you plan on ripping off the fools.

Please don't go blaming the messenger. This is the reality. I'm not going to claim that I know everyone in the Bitcoin milieu. But I've known enough to come up with some generalizations.

[philipma1957]

I think Bitfury is talking about their next group of wafers.  They obviously have deployed the first groups of wafers as they are now 18% of the hashrate.

Unless they just frantically hooked up hundreds of Petahashes of their older technology that was just sitting around right before they get their new chips, which makes little sense to me.

I only hope they plan on selling a big chunk of the next batch of wafers to the public and not keeping all that hashrate for themselves.

Nothing would be worse for bitcoin than thousands of home miners "rage-quitting" and selling all their coins.

this would be okay if home miners have enough coin to drop price to under 200 usd.

A price crash to 150-200usd would cut big farmers badly especially if they are using  s-7's and avalon6's.

right now bitmaintech is holding more then 23,000 coins in 1 or 2 wallets.

a price tank to 150 would cost them 220 x 23,000

[dmwardjr]

I think Bitfury is talking about their next group of wafers.  They obviously have deployed the first groups of wafers as they are now 18% of the hashrate.

Unless they just frantically hooked up hundreds of Petahashes of their older technology that was just sitting around right before they get their new chips, which makes little sense to me.

I only hope they plan on selling a big chunk of the next batch of wafers to the public and not keeping all that hashrate for themselves.

Nothing would be worse for bitcoin than thousands of home miners "rage-quitting" and selling all their coins.

this would be okay if home miners have enough coin to drop price to under 200 usd.

A price crash to 150-200usd would cut big farmers badly especially if they are using  s-7's and avalon6's.

right now bitmaintech is holding more then 23,000 coins in 1 or 2 wallets.

a price tank to 150 would cost them 220 x 23,000

23,000 BTC is only a small drop in the bucket.  We have approximately 15 million bitcoins in existence now.  Most of the bitcoin held today is not by miners but by speculators.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

You thought correctly. I don't do chip design, I'm purely a hardware guy. However, most of the companies my company supports *are* in the semi industry ergo my knowledge of where the chip mfg processes comes from. Our end of things is tightly integrated to what size nodes the Foundries can produce.

That said, I can tell you it is a fact that you are looking at several million $ to develop a chip from scratch. Even when using foundry or design house supplied pre-made IP blocks, TSMC will not even talk to you about 16nm chips unless the chip quantities are over 100k/month...  Push back to 20-22nm and higher and they are much more approachable but that is also outside our target.

Here's my take on the cost:

The hashing engine is so small that one could get it developed and samples manufactured for free in the small corner of some bigger project. The mega-dollar capital outlay would be required only in the final stage of mass-production. The semiconductor foundries routinely "waste" much more chip real estate on various testing structures.

So why nobody did that? My limited experience shows that the prospective market is so filled out with liars, bullshit artists, con men, mythomaniacs and associated naïfs (that are honest, but completely indistinguishable for the former classes) that  it is completely not worth the effort. The only way to do it is as an intellectual curiosity (in secret) or when from the start you plan on ripping off the fools.

Please don't go blaming the messenger. This is the reality. I'm not going to claim that I know everyone in the Bitcoin milieu. But I've known enough to come up with some generalizations.

Overall, a spot-on assessment.
On 'spare' or wasted Si real estate, ja it's there and available for sample runs. If you have a design already laid out that is. Then the only problem becomes getting the foundries to be interested in running them. That simply will not happen unless you convince them that the sample runs will eventually translate into full wafer production.

A good example is from one the customers we did R&D for regarding RFID tags for lab animals. The tag itself is a very common chip with nothing new except for size (needs to fit on the ear of 1week-old lab mice) and packaging material (encased in ceramic to resist chewing). Even with the chips using 22nm junctions they had a devil of a time getting a foundry and packaging house to make samples until they pointed out to them that the the market for the tags is well over 100million/year. THAT got their attention and said tags are now in production.

[philipma1957]

I think Bitfury is talking about their next group of wafers.  They obviously have deployed the first groups of wafers as they are now 18% of the hashrate.

Unless they just frantically hooked up hundreds of Petahashes of their older technology that was just sitting around right before they get their new chips, which makes little sense to me.

I only hope they plan on selling a big chunk of the next batch of wafers to the public and not keeping all that hashrate for themselves.

Nothing would be worse for bitcoin than thousands of home miners "rage-quitting" and selling all their coins.

this would be okay if home miners have enough coin to drop price to under 200 usd.

A price crash to 150-200usd would cut big farmers badly especially if they are using  s-7's and avalon6's.

right now bitmaintech is holding more then 23,000 coins in 1 or 2 wallets.

a price tank to 150 would cost them 220 x 23,000

23,000 BTC is only a small drop in the bucket.  We have approximately 15 million bitcoins in existence now.  Most of the bitcoin held today is not by miners but by speculators.

I don't argue where the coins are held but If bitmaintech flooded the market with s-7's in a private farm as a preemptive strike against 14-16  gear.   a drop in price to  150 would cost them over 5 million in fiat.

the account is 370 x 23000 = 8.5 million usd if coins drop to 150 it is 3.45 million

I would like to see them lose that kind of coin if indeed they are plying this hash spike game.

I am a small potatoes guy 12,000 usd in ⅓ coins, cash, gear.

I like the idea of private  world wide money.

 I know speculators hold a lot of coins.  More then me by far.
They hold more silver then me.
They hold more gold then me.

also in each case they have far more gold silver then I do.
 I will never affect price I am far too small.

[2112]

Overall, a spot-on assessment.
On 'spare' or wasted Si real estate, ja it's there and available for sample runs. If you have a design already laid out that is. Then the only problem becomes getting the foundries to be interested in running them. That simply will not happen unless you convince them that the sample runs will eventually translate into full wafer production.

A good example is from one the customers we did R&D for regarding RFID tags for lab animals. The tag itself is a very common chip with nothing new except for size (needs to fit on the ear of 1week-old lab mice) and packaging material (encased in ceramic to resist chewing). Even with the chips using 22nm junctions they had a devil of a time getting a foundry and packaging house to make samples until they pointed out to them that the the market for the tags is well over 100million/year. THAT got their attention and said tags are now in production.

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.

The incremental cost of adding tiny mining test circuit would be nearly zero. For an engineer with experience in the actual toolchain used in his main project, the additional effort required to drop SHA256D miner is about one to few wasted lunch breaks. All the required expensive work will be done anyway while doing the main project. If the main project already has some scheduled design iterations the miner can ride all of them for free.

This is the way one can tell that people quoting megabucks figures have no actual technical contacts in the industry. They may have some sales or non-technical middle management contacts. The SHA256D miner is so simple that nearly all the R&D on the engine can be done for free by somebody who already has access to the appropriate tools and kits.

The megabucks are only necessary when one wants to mass-produce chips by filling entire wafers with them. The quantification of possible market is also completely different story from the R&D costs.

[jstefanop]

Here is an even better perspective...the combined trading volume for BTC was around 50mil over the last 24 hours. Even if Bitmain decided to dump all 8 mil of their holdings at once on a single exchange (which would be very dumb and they would never do that), the price would crash to around $320-350 depending on the exchange, and would quickly recover.

Even the largest mining companies have less and less say on the economics of bitcoin, and the will be even more true come summer. Thats by design and how its supposed to work. Right now and into the future its going to be all about breaking bitcoin into mass adoption, and that will dictated its acceptance or failure in the long term...not mining. All the miners will eventually just eat themselves to death haha.

[jstefanop]

The megabucks are only necessary when one wants to mass-produce chips by filling entire wafers with them. The quantification of possible market is also completely different story from the R&D costs.

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).

[toptek]

So all a sha256 miners chip is doing in this case unless you have big bucks is riding on the shirt tails of a much bigger thing . like Intel or AMD ? .

bitfury, didn't make the 16 nm design, i know, that's was more like Intel or Samsung etc . TSMC etc   .

What is bitfury actually paying if that is true and how bad are they sticking it to us if they do sell to the public ? .

later i need to let it go .

[sidehack]

So it takes mega bucks to get a batch in production. How many bucks to get a design as far as engineering samples?

[toptek]

So it takes mega bucks to get a batch in production. How many bucks to get a design as far as engineering samples?

This might explain it more .!!! I've had that bookmarked for sometime now, i found Browning one day , it's out dated true but tells a lot .

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made


A non-trivial design will probably cost $3000 or more for 40 chips. The finer the feature size, the more expensive it is to make the masks.