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

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Yes, but this is not much for a mining ASIC even in 22nm. I guess it should equate to about 10 ... 15 unrolled hash cores, because this 22nm GF node is only a 80% shrink of the GF 28nm node, not a true 50% shrink like other 20nm nodes. But therefore the 22nm masks cost only a little bit more than a 28nm mask set.

This is a perfect example of daft thinking of a CAD monkey. No sane hardware engineer would waste that valuable real estate (50 plots of 3 square millimeters each) to fill it out with identical unrolled cores and try to commercially mine with them. The sane engineer would fill those 3 sq.mm with as many different interesting designs as he/she could think of and then compare simulated results with actual results to gauge the accuracy of the toolchain. That is the whole point of prototyping.
<snip>

I'd assume Hyper is talking about final real estate once some ideas have been tried and weeded through no?

Aside from that, as always seems you do bring up points we can agree on, in this case the necessity of doing more than just sims. Just ask BFL, Cointerra, Bitmine.ch as well as others how well that works (going straight from sims/FPGA work directly onto full silicon with pre-order promised delivered-by date(s)) on the horizon. Despite how the expense looks to accounting and the time required as always abhorrent to MArketing, the need to test ideas with physical silicon cannot be bypassed. Running an assload of smaller (and cheaper) dies gives a chance to test different cell layouts  for several different functions to find best and most cost effective of breed to then start integrating together for proto-round-2.

Just like when using SPICE, one cannot always trust what the models say. It's the minutiae of real-world circuitry that never fails to surprise ya from time to time.

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[2112]

Hypermega: Thank you for a very useful reply to Sidehacks questions vs the snarkasim from 2112. Needing to ask questions about things outside of ones core competency is not a bad thing and should be met with better than Ivory Tower attitude.

It takes different kinds of bait to catch different kinds of fish. A touch of snarky-bait convinced eldentyrell to surface his submarine and post a reply after more than a year of underwatersea navigation. Also a salesperson from some fabless boutique made a post.

On smarmy-bait you'll catch fish like Mr. Kashif. Bitfury folks would be crazy to invite him to their office. After exchanging some PM's with him I'm sure that if he somehow had shown up in my company's office the security would escort him out.

It takes a certain appropriate mix of "school smart" with "street smart" to swim in the ASIC waters and not get eaten by sharks.

I'm actually dedicating this post to all of non-engineers who can't understand all that semiconductor industry jargon. For them I wanted to recommend a book by Feng-Hsiung Hsu from 2002 entitled "Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion". He was the lead engineer who designed the chip, but he co-authored this book with some professional writer and the result is a page-turning thriller. There are absolutely no equations. Neither engineering nor chess knowledge is required to enjoy this book.

Obviously the actual technical material and example prices are obsolete. But the book will show the reader how to successfully skate the edge between academia and commerce (in case of Hsu it was Cornell and IBM). His opinion about using commercial "layout services" for repetitive ASICs in my opinion still stands as valid.

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/0691090653/

Use the above link if you are the person who likes to pay and be treated with respect.

http://www.worldcat.org/title/behind-deep-blue-building-the-computer-that-defeated-the-world-chess-champion/oclc/50582855

Use the above link if you are OK with reading this book for a price of smile and a wink to your friendly neighborhood librarian.

[sidehack]

I learned a long time ago that smart people aren't always nice, and nice people aren't always smart. The important thing in any discussion is the two sides end up understanding each other, and I figure most arguments happen because at least one person doesn't care to try and understand the other side. 2112, just keep doin' what you're doing and I'll try and catch up.

Mr Kashif has also PM'd me a couple times over the last few months, mostly asking if I'll talk to him on Skype and only Skype. When I give him alternative options (the kind with a text log of the conversation) instead he disappears for a month then comes back to ask again. So I don't know what you got out of him but so far all I know is he really likes Skype and VoIP systems but apparently is paranoid about text-based communication?

[sloopy]

In my opinion the same outcomes may be accomplished without being such a traditional forum dick.
You do not have to be nice, but being so pompous and egocentric only serves to be that dick.

It is so over the top it is an obvious wish for control that person is unable to exert in day to day life.

Growing up a bit would be an amazing accomplishment for someone so accomplished.

Smart people do not have to be nice. Truly smart people do not talk down to people in the manner exhibited throughout the last few pages of this thread unless they are spoiled and socially challenged without any respect for the subjects they are discussing.

You only see people take the behaviour to that level on the internet. In day to day life they do not last that long without serious physical security or running a corporation where people are afraid of losing their livelihood. Even then they only keep followers or people who are unable to make their livelihood in another company, never true leaders.

In my opinion showing respect for someone with a perverse need to talk to people in that manner only provokes more of the same. It doesn't matter how much someone may or may not be able to offer, if they have a personal need to satisfy which involves talking down to someone in such a vulgar manner they are more concerned with satisfying their own egocentric requirements than they will ever be with helping you accomplish your goals.

More akin to the villain in a story rather than the hero. A villain which leads you to an edge and pushes you over to your death.

The world is a better place without such regardless of almost any potential contribution. It is one thing to be confident in yourself and abilities, but quite another to speak at / down to someone rather than having a reasonable conversation.

It is a weakness, a personality fault, and an obvious cry for attention.

[PlanetCrypto]

Thanks, that's info I (a non-fab chip guy) can sink my teeth into.

... it would be better to cooperate with a IC design service company at least for the first project. You bring the chip concept and architecture, they help you to design, manufacture, package and test it.

Recommendations of companies that have experience in BTC chip design?

From my point of view, it is almost impossible to build up the required competences from scratch, despite you hire some experienced IC designers in your company.

Had a hunch that chip fab was a "black art" with few knowledgeable participants.
We cannot support a $500K budget for tools much less the employee expense to operate said tools.

Where is your company located?

North Central US (North Central Minnesota, near Leech Lake to put a finer point on it).

Considering the ~$1,000 per die prototype expense, the packaging seems cheap.

Is there any advantage to not packaging the prototypes?

[HyperMega]

Yes, but this is not much for a mining ASIC even in 22nm. I guess it should equate to about 10 ... 15 unrolled hash cores, because this 22nm GF node is only a 80% shrink of the GF 28nm node, not a true 50% shrink like other 20nm nodes. But therefore the 22nm masks cost only a little bit more than a 28nm mask set.

This is a perfect example of daft thinking of a CAD monkey. No sane hardware engineer would waste that valuable real estate (50 plots of 3 square millimeters each) to fill it out with identical unrolled cores and try to commercially mine with them. The sane engineer would fill those 3 sq.mm with as many different interesting designs as he/she could think of and then compare simulated results with actual results to gauge the accuracy of the toolchain. That is the whole point of prototyping.
<snip>

I'd assume Hyper is talking about final real estate once some ideas have been tried and weeded through no?

Aside from that, as always seems you do bring up points we can agree on, in this case the necessity of doing more than just sims. Just ask BFL, Cointerra, Bitmine.ch as well as others how well that works (going straight from sims/FPGA work directly onto full silicon with pre-order promised delivered-by date(s)) on the horizon. Despite how the expense looks to accounting and the time required as always abhorrent to MArketing, the need to test ideas with physical silicon cannot be bypassed. Running an assload of smaller (and cheaper) dies gives a chance to test different cell layouts  for several different functions to find best and most cost effective of breed to then start integrating together for proto-round-2.

Just like when using SPICE, one cannot always trust what the models say. It's the minutiae of real-world circuitry that never fails to surprise ya from time to time.

Don't worry, I don't take this personally. The more posts from 2112 I read, the more I get the feeling that he is probably a little bit too long out of the real world ASIC business and if he ever got to know it, then more from an academic point of view. By the way, he is not the only one who had strange experiences with Apache (now Ansys) tools and these are only niche tools, which you need for a very small part of the overall design flow (sorry for the CAD monkey terms ).

You have of course to do a design exploration of different variants of hashing cores. And if you want a complete picture then you have to do it in different technologies. But I doubt that you have to tape-out all these variants to get to know, which one is the best and should be used in the final ASIC. If you are an experienced CAD monkey you can determine which of your variants is the best with high confidence without silicon, at least relatively to each other. Real silicon results will be +/- 15%, maybe +/- 20%, but not more, otherwise you missed something very important during the design phase.
And in any case, finally every working mining ASIC will be a layout based on a replicated highly optimized hashing core, because there is no other efficient way to implement so called multi/many core systems.

If I would do a prototyping run like discussed above (based on a MPW run), then I would try to get as close as possible to the final ASIC with respect to performance, die size and packaging concept to be able to pipe clean the complete miner system design including cooling setup, string regulation concept and so on. That does not exclude that you include different variants of hash cores in the prototype.

Anyway you should keep in mind, that the complete prototyping cycle AFTER you have finished the design will take at least 6 months including packaging, measurements and analysis. That is why almost everybody who has “successfully” brought a miner to market skipped this step.

[HyperMega]

Thanks, that's info I (a non-fab chip guy) can sink my teeth into.

... it would be better to cooperate with a IC design service company at least for the first project. You bring the chip concept and architecture, they help you to design, manufacture, package and test it.

Recommendations of companies that have experience in BTC chip design?

Perfect would be one, which is in your neighbourhood or at least in the same time zone.

Sorry, I don't know any IC design service companies in Minnesota.

www.uniquify.com
(did the design for Hastfast)
www.open-silicon.com
(did the design for Cointerra)

Both are located in CA. Probably not the best examples looking at how the stories ended.

Another one in US (also CA) is www.esilicon.com

But in principle I doubt that any of these companies would implement a 0.1 J/GH ASIC for you below $1M for design services (this does not include the mask costs), if they are interested at all.

The reason for this is that there are no low hanging fruits anymore. If you want to be successful with a new BTC ASIC, many custom CAD monkeys have to work really hard, because any competitive ASIC has to be implemented based on custom digital design techniques to reach 0.1 J/GH.
It is easier to reach this target based on 16nm, but probably not impossible in 28/22/20nm. Anyway it would require very high effort, compared to the first ASICs which hit the market in 2013.

Is there any advantage to not packaging the prototypes?

You can do nothing with bare die samples, despite you have suitable test prober equipment, which is also not cheap.

Maybe a comprise would be a COB setup (Chip on Board). Here the bare dies are directly wire bonded on a fine pitch PCB.

[PlanetCrypto]

Once again, this is stuff I can bite into.
My 40+ years experience in the IT community was mostly coding and network design/trouble shooting.
0 experience in chip fab.
Last degree was a business admin degree.
So I tend to look at things from a cost/benefit perspective.


"Perfect would be one, which is in your neighbourhood or at least in the same time zone."
Yup

"Sorry, I don't know any IC design service companies in Minnesota."
Didn't expect there would be.

"www.uniquify.com
(did the design for Hastfast)
www.open-silicon.com
(did the design for Cointerra)

Both are located in CA. Probably not the best examples looking at how the stories ended. "

Maybe they learned from their "mistakes".

Another one in US (also CA) is www.esilicon.com

"But in principle I doubt that any of these companies would implement a 0.1 J/GH ASIC for you below $1M for design services (this does not include the mask costs), if they are interested at all."

Big money doesn't scare me. Big money outlays with a high likelyhood of a negative ROI does.

"The reason for this is that there are no low hanging fruits anymore. If you want to be successful with a new BTC ASIC, many custom CAD monkeys have to work really hard, because any competitive ASIC has to be implemented based on custom digital design techniques to reach 0.1 J/GH.
It is easier to reach this target based on 16nm, but probably not impossible in 28/22/20nm. Anyway it would require very high effort, compared to the first ASICs which hit the market in 2013."

Paraphrased: It's a bitch to implement a competitive design in 16nm, and hence, expensive.


Given the $13/chip price (versus $4-$6 that was hoped for and assuming they are ever available for sale to the general public, i.e. sidehack et. al.) this "loosens up" the requirements of initial cost outlay. i.e if a comparable (or enhanced) design could make it to the street for, say, $8-$10 / chip (and a whore-ish attitude to sell them to anyone in any quantity) that sounds or "smells" like a business opportunity to me.

My initial projections of $2M to get 500,000 chips in hand, based on the best information at hand, is/was obviously WAY LOW. But the MSRP of that concept was in the $2-$6 each range. If the MSRP gets bumped up to $8-$10 each, then the requisite increase in initial outlay could be warranted. It'll make reaching the "critical mass" initial funding more difficult, but might not be un-doable.

Maybe I'm over simplifying things here, but if 500,000 chips costs $8 each and one marks them up $1 each that sounds like 12.5% ($500,000) gross. In an E-business sales model most of that drops to the "bottom line" (net) and could be used to "seed" the next project.

[2112]

Don't worry, I don't take this personally. The more posts from 2112 I read, the more I get the feeling that he is probably a little bit too long out of the real world ASIC business

That portion agrees with my self-assessment.

and if he ever got to know it, then more from an academic point of view.

This doesn't.

By the way, he is not the only one who had strange experiences with Apache (now Ansys) tools and these are only niche tools, which you need for a very small part of the overall design flow (sorry for the CAD monkey terms).

This portion show that you've didn't read my post with understanding. I never used Apache, I quoted Hashfast's CEO.

You have of course to do a design exploration of different variants of hashing cores. And if you want a complete picture then you have to do it in different technologies. But I doubt that you have to tape-out all these variants to get to know, which one is the best and should be used in the final ASIC. If you are an experienced CAD monkey you can determine which of your variants is the best with high confidence without silicon, at least relatively to each other. Real silicon results will be +/- 15%, maybe +/- 20%, but not more, otherwise you missed something very important during the design phase.

-15% -20% (or any mention of +%) is pure science fiction. The "very important" thing missed by HyperMega (and others) is that coin miner is unlike nearly every digital chip it will be only operated  overclocked/undervolted, in the regions where digital model don't apply and one has to use the mixed-signal or analog design flows.

And in any case, finally every working mining ASIC will be a layout based on a replicated highly optimized hashing core, because there is no other efficient way to implement so called multi/many core systems.

If I would do a prototyping run like discussed above (based on a MPW run), then I would try to get as close as possible to the final ASIC with respect to performance, die size and packaging concept to be able to pipe clean the complete miner system design including cooling setup, string regulation concept and so on. That does not exclude that you include different variants of hash cores in the prototype.

Anyway you should keep in mind, that the complete prototyping cycle AFTER you have finished the design will take at least 6 months including packaging, measurements and analysis. That is why almost everybody who has “successfully” brought a miner to market skipped this step.

Yeah, I'm slowly getting the "new way" of selling the ASIC design services. There are no plans for repeat business, it is strictly one-time hit-and-run affair.

Personally, I wonder about why Spondoolies' subcontractor designed POST (Power-On Self Test) circuitry into otherwise quite competent ASIC design. Then Spondoolies' software had to explicitly re-enable hashing cores that only failed POST when cold, but hashed fine when hot. No other vendors made such a mistake.

This got be something related to the contract between Spondoolies' and their vendors, like somebody doing excessive sandbagging to cover their asses. I wish somebody familiar with current practices (and not bound by NDA) could post their SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).

[in2tactics]

Is it just me or has BitFury tacitly admitted to their failure on the 16nm node?

http://bitfury.com/content/4-press/the_bitfury_group_announces_next_step_as_a_digital_asset_platform_company.pdf

[Mr. Kashif]

@sidehack and @2112 I admit I have zero knowledge on ASIC's and that's the reason why I wanted to talk to you guys about it and yes I'm obsessed with VoIP's because I find it easy and comfortable and as per your requirement of keeping a record log, I don't mind me being recorded. Between Mr. 2112, I'm sorry if you were annoyed by my PM's but I guess that's kind of rude towards people who look up to you in a community. I know you guy's are smart and knowledgeable, I also thought that you might share some light but it's OK now if that doesn't happen. Between I thank you guys to take out you precious time and giving a reply to my annoying PM's. Thank you. and Sorry.

Are we cool now?

[brontosaurus]

Is it just me or has BitFury tacitly admitted to their failure on the 16nm node?

http://bitfury.com/content/4-press/the_bitfury_group_announces_next_step_as_a_digital_asset_platform_company.pdf

Nope, they're just opportunists hoping to hop onto the Blockchain bandwagon, probably are not earning enough from their mining activities to feed all their hangers-on, sorry, executives. And why not? Virtually every 'application' for the technology is pure hokum, it's unbelievable how many organisations have fallen for this.

Definitely a case of The Emperor's New Clothes.

[Finksy]

Well, now that the pony-tail measuring contest is over we can get back to business as usual.

***crickets***

[64dimensions]

Here's maybe not the best, but an interesting article on the technology driving GPU's: http://wccftech.com/amd-unveils-polaris-11-10-gpu/

What's interesting is the following:

1) AMD's follow on GPU's (400 series) to be released in the next few months (NLT summer) will be using Samsung's 14nm Finfet process which has also been licensed to Global Foundries.

2) The 14nm process will double the number of transistors in the main GPU processor to 16 billion.

3) The comments from AMD are that these new processors will be "extremely power efficient".

4) It look's like the money is flowing to the 14nm FF process. If capacity is tied up, this maybe also affecting miner chips.

So doing a crude back of the envelope calculation, if nothing else, at the minimum because of die reduction, you get a 2X increase in hash rate. So just to keep up with the having, the efficiency has to double in order to stay within the same consumer power and size form factor. Very roughly, assuming the generous 120 day flat ROI from BITMAIN and $0.05/kW, you are looking at about $620 (1.4 btc) per unit just scaling up from what an  S7 goes for and using today's difficulty with the block reward cut in half. This doesn't look like a lot of profit.

The NRE engineering not only has to depend on the obvious improvement due the reduction in real estate but hope that the FinFet process, better design, tweaking etc result in better performance which would help profit margins.

I think what might be slowing down hash chip development is that they are probably producing sample chip on multiple (16nm, 14nm?) fab processes in search of performance and yield whereas in the past they could just go to one  28nm, 40nm house and be pretty confident in their NRE costs and results.

[mu77aL]

Sound good but what are the biggest chagnes for the Mining Game?

[rupy]

I have a chip I designed and fabbed through Europractice sitting in front of me right now...

I'm curious, are you building a 16nm miner?

[jstefanop]

So May and nothing?? Do these companies even care about saving any little shred of their reputation that is left? Anyway seems like they are having some big problems with their 16nm chip and are now trying to distance themselves from being just a "mining company" with their recent announcements.

[Sierra8561]

So May and nothing?? Do these companies even care about saving any little shred of their reputation that is left? Anyway seems like they are having some big problems with their 16nm chip and are now trying to distance themselves from being just a "mining company" with their recent announcements.

They don't care. Companies like bitfury have determined it is more profitable to use the chips themselves and supply big customers. Us small mining operations can f*** off as far as they are concerned.

[CjMapope]

So May and nothing?? Do these companies even care about saving any little shred of their reputation that is left? Anyway seems like they are having some big problems with their 16nm chip and are now trying to distance themselves from being just a "mining company" with their recent announcements.

personally i don't think they care about their rep anymore. i think alot of companies get to a point where they choose profit over rep
(only to a point where their rep affects their profit of course, but "us" the community no longer have any power over Bitfury) <-- we used to have some say when our btc was funding their research with products they made and such, but let's face it that time is done, we have outlived our usefullness to them ;\

at this point i just pray they do SOMETHING to cut us in, even if it's open up some form of cloud mining with them
(remember on cex-io ,Bitfury's cloud mining has been "unprofitable" forever now) RIGHT ;\ so i shouldn't have faith on that front probably either...

[toptek]

So May and nothing?? Do these companies even care about saving any little shred of their reputation that is left? Anyway seems like they are having some big problems with their 16nm chip and are now trying to distance themselves from being just a "mining company" with their recent announcements.

personally i don't think they care about their rep anymore. i think alot of companies get to a point where they choose profit over rep
(only to a point where their rep affects their profit of course, but "us" the community no longer have any power over Bitfury) <-- we used to have some say when our btc was funding their research with products they made and such, but let's face it that time is done, we have outlived our usefullness to them ;\

at this point i just pray they do SOMETHING to cut us in, even if it's open up some form of cloud mining with them
(remember on cex-io ,Bitfury's cloud mining has been "unprofitable" forever now) RIGHT ;\ so i shouldn't have faith on that front probably either...

all they see is $$ it's the same any place with anything all most,  it  seems if big bucks are there it's pretty much fuck the rest, just with bitcoins it seems more obvious .  but i didn't believe bitfury form day one when they first posted it back in DEC i hoped I was wrong but they played us got what they wanted . the rest well is fuck off, again i do indeed hope I'm wrong .