Community Miner Design Discussion

[LASERminer]

Who is "they"? Either you know something I don't or you're mistaken.

My bad, assumed to much from philipma1957 post about mail from Canaan.

[irritant]

http://www.asicboost.com/

[LASERminer]

AFAIK AsicBoost is a design solution for chip makers, and since this project is about utilising ready made chips it is most likely irrelevant.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

AFAIK AsicBoost is a design solution for chip makers, and since this project is about utilising ready made chips it is most likely irrelevant.

Not necessarily...
Reading through their whitepaper is answering a lot questions I've been accumulating in the back of me mind on just what a mining chip Wizard is doing behind its curtain. Well, under its hood actually... Ever since Sidehack mention at least passing interest in mebe learning chip design my Muse's cat, Curiosity, has been bugging me about it...

EDIT: Thoughts on https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf from ASICboost on their idea? So far looks like they say they have a different and more efficient use of gates achieved by using a different logic structure/flow than other folks.

Only 1 person I can think of can give me insight as to a 'yesss......' or , 'meh' and and they are not into BTC per se but are Wizard of chip-level data flow the likes I've rarely seen.

Gotta say ever since making a chip was brought up my natural curiosity into everything got me to thinking about what goes on inside a mining ASIC and methinks that paper is answering a some of that.

[philipma1957]

Who is "they"? Either you know something I don't or you're mistaken.

My bad, assumed to much from philipma1957 post about mail from Canaan.

I offered to run a group buy with blockC  which would be like the other two I did with the a6.


Right I do not have any info on new chips for sidehack.

So far as I know no one is selling any to at the moment.

I have not signed any NDA with anyone as my expertise is not in building gear.

I am a facilator more then any thing else.  I also choose to do this with close to zero profit.

As my goal is promoting mining for small players.

Small is under 10k usd.

[2112]

Reading through their whitepaper is answering a lot questions I've been accumulating in the back of me mind on just what a mining chip Wizard is doing behind its curtain. Well, under its hood actually... Ever since Sidehack mention at least passing interest in mebe learning chip design my Muse's cat, Curiosity, has been bugging me about it...

EDIT: Thoughts on https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf from ASICboost on their idea? So far looks like they say they have a different and more efficient use of gates achieved by using a different logic structure/flow than other folks.

Only 1 person I can think of can give me insight as to a 'yesss......' or , 'meh' and and they are not into BTC per se but are Wizard of chip-level data flow the likes I've rarely seen.

Gotta say ever since making a chip was brought up my natural curiosity into everything got me to thinking about what goes on inside a mining ASIC and methinks that paper is answering a some of that.

Firstly: ASICboost isn't any company. It is Timo Hanke, a German scientist who was the only technical employee of Cointerra that was willing to show his face in their marketing video (aside from the CEO). My quick take on the guy: he was forced to work/shill for Cointerra due to some immigration paperwork screwup/problem. His permanent residency and employment seems to be in Germany. The ASICboost publication seems like a quick way to salvage his academic career in Germany. It is also very dirty work, the PDF still has embedded links to http://www.lucidchart.com/ website to allow editing the figures.

Other than this the paper is too short on information to make an informed decision. First of all: it has nothing to do with ASICs, it is pure marketing. This is some sort of high-level transformation that could be reproduced in CPU/GPU/FPGA miner. But those are no longer commercially competitive, therefore the reference to the ASICs.

There's only one table (Fig.6) showing percentage gains up to 23.4%. But those seem to be purely combinatorial figures, there's no estimation of saved power or lowered gate counts.

One of my professors at school had an advice for young scientists: If the numbers are good: multiply them by 2 and publish widely. If the numbers are bad: divide them by 10 and hide in the bottommost drawer.

arXiv is a pre-print archive, there's no peer review of the papers published there. The peer review could however happen later.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

I take that as a 'meh' vote 
I  thought the gist of what the paper says sounded familiar. <light bulb> In early 2014 when I was getting into mining the Cointerra website made mention of stuff like that for enhanced performance vs others.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Just tossing this out there to see where the cow pie plops
you said it needs high level pre conditioning of the data the actual sha hashing cores handle and that cpu-type of operation normally is not present in each ASIC. Very true now and in the past but what if say a tiny ARM core or other MC was put inside of each ASIC to do that? That would be very easy to do these days. Possibilities there?

[2112]

Just tossing this out there to see where the cow pie plops
you said it needs high level pre conditioning of the data the actual sha hashing cores handle and that cpu-type of operation normally is not present in each ASIC. Very true now and in the past but what if say a tiny ARM core or other MC was put inside of each ASIC to do that? That would be very easy to do these days. Possibilities there?

I think that you are still thinking at a too low level.

My reading of Timo Hanke's paper is that it is some high-level algebraic-combinatorial transformation that has to be done only once, very early in the design stage. Once that transformation is done no further software/hardware/logic would be required in the implementation.

Edit: Let me put it in different words. The Bitcoin SHA256D hash can be written as one very long equation with 80*8=640 binary variables. Then the conventional miner changes only 32 of those 640 binary variables (32-bit nonce). Each hashing core would be a hardware implementation of that single very long equation, but for all cores on the chip the other 76*8=608 bits are the same.

Timo Hanke apparently found a mathematical way of reorganizing that computation by changing other bits out of the 640 binary input variables. His transformation seems to be some sort of common subexpression elimination when that very long equation is written multiple times. So in other words the hashing cores in a chip would be no longer independent but would have some shared parts in groups of e.g. 16 for 23.4% total savings versus 16 completely independent cores.

My understanding is that it should be completely possible to explain his transformation with mathematical symbols. Be he had chosen to not publish the details. It is possible that those details could be prohibitively long for normal scientific publication, like hundreds of pages.

[Biodom]

Reading through their whitepaper is answering a lot questions I've been accumulating in the back of me mind on just what a mining chip Wizard is doing behind its curtain. Well, under its hood actually... Ever since Sidehack mention at least passing interest in mebe learning chip design my Muse's cat, Curiosity, has been bugging me about it...

EDIT: Thoughts on https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.00575.pdf from ASICboost on their idea? So far looks like they say they have a different and more efficient use of gates achieved by using a different logic structure/flow than other folks.

Only 1 person I can think of can give me insight as to a 'yesss......' or , 'meh' and and they are not into BTC per se but are Wizard of chip-level data flow the likes I've rarely seen.

Gotta say ever since making a chip was brought up my natural curiosity into everything got me to thinking about what goes on inside a mining ASIC and methinks that paper is answering a some of that.

One of my professors at school had an advice for young scientists: If the numbers are good: multiply them by 2 and publish widely. If the numbers are bad: divide them by 10 and hide in the bottommost drawer.

arXiv is a pre-print archive, there's no peer review of the papers published there. The peer review could however happen later.

...are you kidding? Perhaps, I misunderstood, or it is true in chip design, but it (what the prof said) makes absolutely no sense in other sciences, like physics, chemistry or biology.

[2112]

...are you kidding? Perhaps, I misunderstood, or it is true in chip design, but it (what the prof said) makes absolutely no sense in other sciences, like physics, chemistry or biology.

Yeah? In which science you will get recognition for publishing a paper that would effectively say: "we worked hard trying to improve previously published results, but failed"? It is a common problem that gaining a negative knowledge doesn't get you promoted.

The only way to get promoted is to improve or falsify somebody's else results. And falsification may brand you a spoilsport.

[alani123]

link deleted by alani123

Dammit I feel bad now. 

[valkir]

ALERT

The link above is not the official spondoolies tech website. Check the name of the company it's spondoolies lech.

Careful when you post a link. Official website: http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/

Spondoolies already said SP45 doesn't exist

[Unacceptable]

ALERT

The link above is not the official spondoolies tech website. Check the name of the company it's spondoolies lech.

Careful when you post a link. Official website: http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/

Spondoolies already said SP45 doesn't exist

Great catch!!!! BEWARE FOLKS!!!!!!!!

[alani123]

Link removed, wow. I saw it on Reddit and thought it was legit, apparently it isn't. Sorry. I wasn't on alert and dumb enough to post without checking.

Archive here: https://archive.is/GDBJP

[HerbPean]

ALERT

The link above is not the official spondoolies tech website. Check the name of the company it's spondoolies lech.

Careful when you post a link. Official website: http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/

Spondoolies already said SP45 doesn't exist

Great catch!!!! BEWARE FOLKS!!!!!!!!

Yeah thanks men, always appreciated !

[Unacceptable]

Link removed, wow. I saw it on Reddit and thought it was legit, apparently it isn't. Sorry. I wasn't on alert and dumb enough to post without checking.

Archive here: https://archive.is/GDBJP

Not your fault,I clicked & thought it was legit,didn't even think it was a fake it looked so good 

Just glad someone caught it 

[valkir]

Link removed, wow. I saw it on Reddit and thought it was legit, apparently it isn't. Sorry. I wasn't on alert and dumb enough to post without checking.

Archive here: https://archive.is/GDBJP

Thanks for the remove.

[hurricandave]

Came across this and thought it was a cool read..... https://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/powerhouse/archive/2016/05/06/ac-dc-accuracy

[RoadStress]

ALERT

The link above is not the official spondoolies tech website. Check the name of the company it's spondoolies lech.

Careful when you post a link. Official website: http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/

Spondoolies already said SP45 doesn't exist

Great catch!!!! BEWARE FOLKS!!!!!!!!

+10000 satoshis *changetip*