Community Miner Design Discussion

[kilo17]

I wanted to bring up the discussion of hardware that is out and coming out into one place.  In trying to follow some of the discussion about hardware it has become a little difficult.  I am hoping to generate some of the great conversations that tend to overflow from one thread to another (often times on the wrong companies thread)

I will try to get the discussion going with a few key points.

AVALON
Avalon6 - 3.5 Th/s retail price $900 at 0.29 watts/GH.  Recently with Batch 2 it is up to 3.8 Th/s

BITMAIN
Antminer S7 - Batch 11 - $720 for 4.73 Th/s at around .28-.31 watts/GH

BITFURY-
Bitfury has stated on the Bitfury discussion thread that a miner with Bitfury chips will be available to the public BEFORE April 1.  They are claiming 100GH/s at 0.1 J/GH and the chip goes up to 180GH/s with immersion cooling.  They have not made it apparent if those are different chip batches or PCB's.  

They only reference to price I have seen is from asiabtc for 10 Th at $2000 - old thread

BW - LK Group
Obviously mining with their new miners. Posting and updating the news frequently.  I have found 2 pieces of info intriguing:
1 - They have 2 chips:
          BW-LK1401 - 160 W/Th
          BW-LK1402 - 95 W/Th
          Link to info - https://www.bw.com/news/show-65
2 - They have also announced that hardware will be available to the public in April.

Spondoolies - SP50
KNC- Not Available to the Public
          

Hopefully it will also be a bit easier to get raw chips from one of them.

Edited to clarify - Trying to facilitate a discussion around building a community miner and chips available with design implications.  Things of importance are the design, the chips to use and the availability of the chips etc.

SideHack has mentioned in another thread (aka SideHack Thread ) about the design going on for a miner- I am the party he mentioned and currently I am in talks with a couple of different companies about chips.

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[kilo17]

Reserved for future hardware/chip updates

[NotFuzzyWarm]

<snip>
I am hoping that with all of this we will see a little competition making it affordable for us home miners.
I am actually pretty excited to see BW making it known they will be selling miners and putting up pictures of the actual miners being built.  I think RichBC posted the pics on the other thread and they interesting pics.  It also looks to me like they are building up some hype and making it known what they have to offer, unlike BitFury who still seem to be tight lipped about what is actually going to happen.

Spondoolies - SP50
KNC- Not Available to the Public
          
Hopefully it will also be a bit easier to get raw chips from one of them.

Competition for us would be great but rather depends on the pricing model the mfgr's are wanting to follow. It's a slippery slope between what market will bear (good profits) and Consumer electronics pricing with next to nil profits.

Once the various new chips come out and get any needed batch-2 tweaks it will only take 1 vendor to decide to sell a near loss to kill the others.

[sidehack]

Hey, that sounds like fun.

[toptek]

Don't forget the new script miner coming there gonna be pretty bad ass .  

They may not be direct bitcoin miners but are bitcoin miners non the less they just do it a different way and should be included in with any new hard ware coming .


he left out

Innosilicon they make both miners direct bit coin miners and in direct ones aka script miners. sense bw aka lk makes there own chips now .

[davecoin]

I'm enjoying a silent basement but I had to build a gpu rig just to scratch "the itch".  Hopefully some of the new gear will quiet enough for in home use.

[Laosai]

Hey, i'm not sure of it but none of those hardware will be profitable once the halving is reached no? At least not with the current price!

[toptek]

Hey, i'm not sure of it but none of those hardware will be profitable once the halving is reached no? At least not with the current price!

others  say the new 14/16 nm  will with the right power price but the bottom line is no one really knows for sure till it happen, right now it's all guessing and hoping. imo it won't be any diff then it is now except the older miners like s5 and down might become useless and we will get 12.5 less coins per block etc  and in four years it happens again.That's how i see it if I'm wrong then I'm wrong and I'll adjust .

[kilo17]

Myself and several others are looking into designing a board, SideHack has mentioned an S1 replacement board and he is working on a board with me.  The design will be open source and we are wanting to bring it to the Home Miners here on the forum.

BTW - I personally have No interest in Scrypt Miners or Dual Miners

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Nor I for a BTC Community miner. If the failed WASP project teaches anything it is to stay focused on 1 thing at a time whenever possible.

[RoadStress]

Never again

[sidehack]

Most of what I learned from the failed WASP project backed up my opinions about the evils of beaurocracy, and also how important it is to design a prototype that you can actually build and test. There will be no design-by-committee racking up hundreds of hours of conversation while one guy blows through the entire budget on a fleet of impossible layouts. There's just a couple guys with particular skills and an overarching design mentality of simplicity and reliability.

I guess this is kilo's nod that we're okay to talk about what's going on. I'm talking with NotFuzzyWarm and jstefanop about helping so we can get things done quickly and show off a prototype. The first model will probably be an Avalon A3218-based board, if we can figure out how to make 'em work. The plan is to design a power and controls structure that gets open-sourced, so it can be used on other designs. What Novak and I had started with the pods and such, it'll continue from that. What my basic plan is, is to use a basic USB-capable AVR microcontroller as a board-level brain. The chip Novak liked had a decent array of IO bus, including UART, SPI and I2C. We can interface to sensors and controls using I2C, use GPIO for fan speed, and interface to ASICs on UART or SPI. Packets sent to the controller would have two segments - one for controls and one for chip signals. The controls are things that would get implemented at the micro - reporting temperatures, adjusting voltages, stuff like that. The chip signals would get unpacked and relayed directly on the chip bus (whichever it is for that particular design). A cgminer driver would handle running the controls and encapsulating the chip work.
Alongside that, I'd really like to design a dual-phase buck regulator that'll handle at least 25A per phase and adjust within the range of about 5V to 9V with a conversion efficiency (off 12Vin) of at least 95% across a typical load range. Adjustment would be done digitally, with measurement alteration being handled by the aforementioned microcontroller.

If this turns out how I think it can, we'd have a basic yet fairly powerful framework that can be adjusted to different numbers (and types) of chips, with only minimal changes required to firmware and cgminer driver. Of course a different chip is going to require a different work protocol and stuff, but you'd have to put that in anyway. A lot of the USB packeting and such would be already done.

If possible, we'd like to secure Bitfury ASICs for a "final product" that would be compatible with S1/3/5 chassis. Looking at something 4TH/480W wall (stock), undervoltable to about 2.6TH/200W wall. I really want to be able to sell a two-board set for $600 but I don't know if that'll be possible (which is to say, more than cost but less than expected mining revenue).

A second goal, since we're trying to figure out Avalon stuff, is use the framework to build a beefy Novec board with A3218 and see how it handles.

[philipma1957]

I have an interest in these. I just started a thread on the solar array project. With buysolar and myself.

So a bitfury miner would be very nice.

We hope to have 16kwatts. Since I have five avalon6s that use around 4.8 kwatts and he has an s-7 using 1.1 kwatts we have about 10 kwatts extra power.

I think the timing suits us since the array will finish just about when the bitfury gear drops.

So I am thinking this tech is something buysolar and I would want in on.

I see there are a lot of us in mining section that have a lot in common.

Kind of like a classic car club.

I will look in on this thread often.

[sobe-it]

I'm in for anything that is quieter than a jet engine (s1/s3 range) and is reliable 24/7 without attention. Something within 100-600 watts would be great too, or at least something that can be underclocked/undervolted to that range at less than .1w/Ghs.

I like the idea sidehack was talking about building boards to fit s1/s3/s5/c1 heatsinks/frame when he was messing with the 1384. Either 2 or 4 boards per miner would give the community back choices depending on money they have or watt usage available. No more being railroaded into 1kw/$2000+ miners at launch with no other options rendering us out of the game. I am a home miner with limited funds paying ~$0.13/kwh. A 1/4 miner running 200w at about 2Ths would be great, giving an s3 (they are everywhere) a capable 8Ths/800w. Granted they can be packed more dense for higher speed at lower wattage but this raises the cost per board, I am figuring the worst .1w/ghs so 20 chips per 1/4 board at 100Ghs (maybe less). This would give a c1 a theoretical almost silent 16Ths.......... damn that would be a great dream for some guys out there.

The thing about designing off this chassis is almost everyone has one hashing/collecting dust or can grab a s1/s3 dirt cheap and retrofit it. Why waste time making/designing a case or heatsinks let alone make us pay for them when we have so many available for retrofit within 5 min to 3 days. Pump as many of these bad boys out as you can.

[sidehack]

It'd be a full-size blade, so two boards would make a full 4TH miner. If you had a C1 you could run it at 8TH, or more if you can keep it cool (potentially pushing 10TH at about 1200W DC).

I'm a big fan of stuff in the 300-500W neighborhood, and also between purchases and donations I have around 45 S1/3/5 laying around the shop to refit.

[sobe-it]

It'd be a full-size blade, so two boards would make a full 4TH miner. If you had a C1 you could run it at 8TH, or more if you can keep it cool (potentially pushing 10TH at about 1200W DC).

I'm a big fan of stuff in the 300-500W neighborhood, and also between purchases and donations I have around 45 S1/3/5 laying around the shop to refit.

Yea I was in the middle of typing that, went to eat.... came back and finished it and you had already responded which made my post seem awkward. Either way I posted it. Total speed or number of boards don't matter to me and Im sure others wouldn't either. I have a s1, 4 s3s and 2 s5s around the house, Retro fitting 1 to possibly 2 would be more than enough for me.

[philipma1957]

yeah between buysolar and I we are really looking forward to seeing this thread take off.

Here is a link to the solar array that we hope to use this threads gear in.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1369207.msg13932062#msg13932062

[Biodom]

Very exciting project...thanks

Just a side note: Personally, i don't have S1, S3 or S5-had all three types, but sold them off as they became obsolete.
Buying used S3 or S5 again just to fit the new board?
Miner might have higher demand than boards, but I might be mistaken.

[philipma1957]

Very exciting project...thanks

Just a side note: Personally, i don't have S1, S3 or S5-had all three types, but sold them off as they became obsolete.
Buying used S3 or S5 again just to fit the new board?
Miner might have higher demand than boards, but I might be mistaken.

well he does say he has  40-45 case  frames .

I believe I can get five more frames as buysolar has at least four or five s-1s'   more like 10 but we would need some for refitting in the array.

seems like times are looking up a bit.

[Biodom]

Very exciting project...thanks

Just a side note: Personally, i don't have S1, S3 or S5-had all three types, but sold them off as they became obsolete.
Buying used S3 or S5 again just to fit the new board?
Miner might have higher demand than boards, but I might be mistaken.

well he does say he has  40-45 case  frames .

I believe I can get five more frames as buysolar has at least four or five s-1s'   more like 10 but we would need some for refitting in the array.

seems like times are looking up a bit.

not sure that he meant those for sale, but if so, then it's good.