Them BFL Cowboys

[NEO2012]

I love the heatsink holder design for the i3. The sound they make when putting them in is very satisfying like typing on a Model M. Cronk-crunk-cronk

oh u love the heatsink design taht was not designed for duble or triple power consumtion =triple heat?

i bet u love snakes also then like josh

bfl really faked up just total disaster

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[Dargo]

Worst case power consumption is now apparently 195w for a single SC. More than 3x advertised. Do these people ever tell the truth?

Scarier still is that Josh's worst case estimates often turn out to be the nearer to best case.

I wouldn't wanna be a batch #1 customers. Don't wanna be a guinea pig.

195W for such a tiny case, such a tiny heatsink and such a tiny fan - how is that supposed to work?

195W is about the same amount of power a 7970s uses - and they have huge heat sinks.

If you read the shout log transcript, it is clear that they won't be shipping any 195w singles. Not saying this makes the issue go away, but it won't be as bad as 195w.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b8hvt/bfl_josh_updates_on_asic_status_full_transcript/

Relevant excerpts:

SgtSpike: What's the current power usage?
BFL_Josh: We are trying to nail it down. We have some boards at 1.76w, some at 2.5 and some at 4 and one at 6 <- although I think the ones at 4 and 6 have either a broken power regulator and/or a bad power brick, because they power brick is only 120w and it's drawing like 195 watts which is ridiculous. When I get hte firmware here in KC, I'll be running it off of an ATX PSU to eliminate the power brick as the culprit. So you see, this is why the power issue is causing some difficulties.

BFL_Josh: If the cooling becomes an issue, like I said, we'd scale it back and ship multiple units.

smracer: So you will get 2 30Gh machines for each 60?
BFL_Josh: If need be, yes.

BFL_Josh: We will ship whatever we have to to get people hashing at their expected GH.
Lab_Rat: well then worst case scenario for a single would be 360W???
BFL_Josh: No, worst case is 195w, but the power systems on the board aren't rated to handle that really I don't think, so we'd back off the hashrate before we'd let it get that high.
Lab_Rat: ok thank you. they can handle up to what 120W?
BFL_Josh: Yeah I think 120w is a nice comfortable number. It can probably got a bit higher than that, but 195w is probably not where we want to be.
onryo: Wont a x4 unit blow the power unit?
BFL_Josh: Yeah, so we'd have to back off the hashrate on a per unit basis if that were the case.
BFL_Josh: We'd do like 2x 30GH/s singles in stead of 1 60 GH/s one
BFL_Josh: We will ship the purchased hashrate regardless of what it ends up costing us.
MrTeal: @BFL_Josh, do the LIttle Singles have all of the power supply circuitry populated, and could they run at 30GH/s even if the Big Single can't run at 60GH/s?
BFL_Josh: Yes
HTL2001: I think he means, if you ordered a big single they might do 2x little singles since the power limit is per board, not per chip
BFL_Josh: [HTL2001 is] correct

jjiimm64: Josh, will the paired down units still have all the chips in them?
BFL_Josh: Yes they will

[NEO2012]

Worst case power consumption is now apparently 195w for a single SC. More than 3x advertised. Do these people ever tell the truth?

Scarier still is that Josh's worst case estimates often turn out to be the nearer to best case.

I wouldn't wanna be a batch #1 customers. Don't wanna be a guinea pig.

195W for such a tiny case, such a tiny heatsink and such a tiny fan - how is that supposed to work?

195W is about the same amount of power a 7970s uses - and they have huge heat sinks.

If you read the shout log transcript, it is clear that they won't be shipping any 195w singles. Not saying this makes the issue go away, but it won't be as bad as 195w.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b8hvt/bfl_josh_updates_on_asic_status_full_transcript/

Relevant excerpts:

SgtSpike: What's the current power usage?
BFL_Josh: We are trying to nail it down. We have some boards at 1.76w, some at 2.5 and some at 4 and one at 6 <- although I think the ones at 4 and 6 have either a broken power regulator and/or a bad power brick, because they power brick is only 120w and it's drawing like 195 watts which is ridiculous. When I get hte firmware here in KC, I'll be running it off of an ATX PSU to eliminate the power brick as the culprit. So you see, this is why the power issue is causing some difficulties.

BFL_Josh: If the cooling becomes an issue, like I said, we'd scale it back and ship multiple units.

smracer: So you will get 2 30Gh machines for each 60?
BFL_Josh: If need be, yes.

BFL_Josh: We will ship whatever we have to to get people hashing at their expected GH.
Lab_Rat: well then worst case scenario for a single would be 360W???
BFL_Josh: No, worst case is 195w, but the power systems on the board aren't rated to handle that really I don't think, so we'd back off the hashrate before we'd let it get that high.
Lab_Rat: ok thank you. they can handle up to what 120W?
BFL_Josh: Yeah I think 120w is a nice comfortable number. It can probably got a bit higher than that, but 195w is probably not where we want to be.
onryo: Wont a x4 unit blow the power unit?
BFL_Josh: Yeah, so we'd have to back off the hashrate on a per unit basis if that were the case.
BFL_Josh: We'd do like 2x 30GH/s singles in stead of 1 60 GH/s one
BFL_Josh: We will ship the purchased hashrate regardless of what it ends up costing us.
MrTeal: @BFL_Josh, do the LIttle Singles have all of the power supply circuitry populated, and could they run at 30GH/s even if the Big Single can't run at 60GH/s?
BFL_Josh: Yes
HTL2001: I think he means, if you ordered a big single they might do 2x little singles since the power limit is per board, not per chip
BFL_Josh: [HTL2001 is] correct

jjiimm64: Josh, will the paired down units still have all the chips in them?
BFL_Josh: Yes they will

beside the heat sink fan issues

out of 1000 chips withc would mean 125 singles

they would need to ship dule aka use 16 chips at least per 60gh

so out of delivery will be 60 orders out of 27000

aka u will not see ur asic in 2013 if u didnt order in june or july last year

[Entropy-uc]

Right, the Thunderbirds. Those were neat. Instant heat death.

I kinda recall that to have the AMD Athlon release the smoke one had to remove the cooler? I worked more with Intel Itanium and Itanium 2 machines and those indeed were beastly: the CPU replacement required the wrenches from the car mechanic's toolset.

Their were field reports of fires in white box AMD computers at the time.  AMD adamantly denied it was possible, which lead to the video demonstrations that you could cause one to catch fire by removing the heat sink.

The problem was that AMD went cheap and didn't have thermal diodes in the silicon.  They left it to the motherboard manufacturers to put cheaper thermocouples on the motherboards.  So it turned out there were a number of manufacturing defects^* that could lead to a flaming Thunderbird.

So Josh, do you have thermal diodes on those die?  Do you even know how to calibrate a thermal diode properly?


^*  One of those manufacturing defects would be bad underfill.  

[2112]

Their were field reports of fires in white box AMD computers at the time.  AMD adamantly denied it was possible, which lead to the video demonstrations that you could cause one to catch fire by removing the heat sink.

The problem was that AMD went cheap and didn't have thermal diodes in the silicon.  They left it to the motherboard manufacturers to put cheaper thermocouples on the motherboards.  So it turned out there were a number of manufacturing defects^* that could lead to a flaming Thunderbird.

Yeah, I've heard about smoking, flaming and fires too in the white-label reseller channels (like MWave, etc.). Because the people in my company were involved in the reselling of the AMD products I have some additional inside information:

1) on-the-motherboard thermal protection was too slow acting in the most common failure mode: spring loaded heatsink mount unsnapped because it either:

1a) was never snapped in properly all the way
1b) was snapped properly but snapping-in caused cracking of the plastic socket latch

2) rampant remarking and overclocking of AMD Athlons, including defective chips destined for industrial waste disposal. AMD Malaysia was the leaky culprit here: chips that failed tests were shipped to Taiwan or Singapore for intended destruction/recycling but it fact were remarked and shipped back to Malaysia for reintroduction into the reseller channel. This was made easier by the fact that the clock selection and feature selection (Athlon XP/MP/Mobile) traces were easily accessible on the Athlon OPGA package. Additionally AMD was really tardy in investigating and prosecuting the in-the-channel diversion.

In my company they dealt with 1) and 2) with simple visual inspection after dismounting the heathsink, remounting it and doing additional burn-in with memtest86. I came at the tail edge of the problem and changed the burn in to use PRIME95 from the GIMPS prime number search. The before-burn-in failure rate was apparently quite high, I don't know the numbers because it was essentially free to us, MWave covered that. After-the-burn-in failure rate was very low, lower than what we were getting later on with white-label Dells and Supermicros. Cheap ECC RAM support in Athlons was a real godsend. I still have several of those machines in the QA farm alongside Slot-1 Intel Pentiums III.

I wish somebody who was really involved in this in South-East Asia would write some sort of war memoir of the whole story.

[Entropy-uc]

Their were field reports of fires in white box AMD computers at the time.  AMD adamantly denied it was possible, which lead to the video demonstrations that you could cause one to catch fire by removing the heat sink.

The problem was that AMD went cheap and didn't have thermal diodes in the silicon.  They left it to the motherboard manufacturers to put cheaper thermocouples on the motherboards.  So it turned out there were a number of manufacturing defects^* that could lead to a flaming Thunderbird.

Yeah, I've heard about smoking, flaming and fires too in the white-label reseller channels (like MWave, etc.). Because the people in my company were involved in the reselling of the AMD products I have some additional inside information:

1) on-the-motherboard thermal protection was too slow acting in the most common failure mode: spring loaded heatsink mount unsnapped because it either:

1a) was never snapped in properly all the way
1b) was snapped properly but snapping-in caused cracking of the plastic socket latch

2) rampant remarking and overclocking of AMD Athlons, including defective chips destined for industrial waste disposal. AMD Malaysia was the leaky culprit here: chips that failed tests were shipped to Taiwan or Singapore for intended destruction/recycling but it fact were remarked and shipped back to Malaysia for reintroduction into the reseller channel. This was made easier by the fact that the clock selection and feature selection (Athlon XP/MP/Mobile) traces were easily accessible on the Athlon OPGA package. Additionally AMD was really tardy in investigating and prosecuting the in-the-channel diversion.

In my company they dealt with 1) and 2) with simple visual inspection after dismounting the heathsink, remounting it and doing additional burn-in with memtest86. I came at the tail edge of the problem and changed the burn in to use PRIME95 from the GIMPS prime number search. The before-burn-in failure rate was apparently quite high, I don't know the numbers because it was essentially free to us, MWave covered that. After-the-burn-in failure rate was very low, lower than what we were getting later on with white-label Dells and Supermicros. Cheap ECC RAM support in Athlons was a real godsend. I still have several of those machines in the QA farm alongside Slot-1 Intel Pentiums III.

I wish somebody who was really involved in this in South-East Asia would write some sort of war memoir of the whole story.

I've been to our Penang sites.  AMD has a factory in the same industrial park.  Our security makes the airports seem hands off.  All scrap goes into grinders on site with every part accounted for by the kind of security guards you really don't want to annoy.

It was a very competitive time.  We learned as many hard lessons as AMD did.  And BFL is so far outside of the design rules learned from those lessons that I can say with complete confidence that from here, they are going to have a really bad time.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Right, the Thunderbirds. Those were neat. Instant heat death.

I kinda recall that to have the AMD Athlon release the smoke one had to remove the cooler? I worked more with Intel Itanium and Itanium 2 machines and those indeed were beastly: the CPU replacement required the wrenches from the car mechanic's toolset.

Their were field reports of fires in white box AMD computers at the time.  AMD adamantly denied it was possible, which lead to the video demonstrations that you could cause one to catch fire by removing the heat sink.

The problem was that AMD went cheap and didn't have thermal diodes in the silicon.  They left it to the motherboard manufacturers to put cheaper thermocouples on the motherboards.  So it turned out there were a number of manufacturing defects^* that could lead to a flaming Thunderbird.

So Josh, do you have thermal diodes on those die?  Do you even know how to calibrate a thermal diode properly?


^*  One of those manufacturing defects would be bad underfill.  

Hence... http://www.ul.com/global/eng/pages/corporate/contactus/faq/general/background/

Do I need to have the UL Mark on my product in the United States? Is there a law stating that my product should have a UL Mark? Does our product require UL testing?

Manufacturers submit products to UL for testing and safety certification on a voluntary basis. There are no laws specifying that a UL Mark must be used. However, in the United States there are many municipalities that have laws, codes or regulations which require a product to be tested by a nationally recognized testing laboratory before it can be sold in their area. UL is the largest and oldest nationally recognized testing laboratory in the United States. UL does not, however, maintain a list of the jurisdictions having such regulations.

If you plan to market your product nationally or internationally, it is advisable to obtain UL Listing. If a limited marketing program is anticipated, check with the municipal office having jurisdiction in the particular areas to learn the local retail ordinances or product installation requirements applicable in that area.

Many companies make it their policy to obtain UL Listing not only to minimize the possibility of local non-acceptance, but also as a matter of corporate policy and commitment to minimize the possibility of risk in the use of their products.

Now read the following: http://www.bureauveritas.com/wps/wcm/connect/bv_com/Group/Home/About-Us/Our-Business/Our-Business-Consumer-Products/Resources/Frequently+Asked+Questions/FCC

[Frizz23]

What's up with this mischievousness?

This poor customer waited almost 12 month.

Every other company would have said something like: "We are very sorry that you had to wait 12 months! But your order goes into production at this very moment! Would you prefer if we ship it?".

BFL is such an asshole company.

[becoin]

What's up with this mischievousness?

They see how BFL ponzi time is ending soon. This is why they are so nervous about every refund request.

[Frizz23]

The real problem here is, as has already been at least partially mentioned:

1. The lack of transparency in the process.
2. The lack of communication.
3. The lies and false promises made by BFL Support Staff.
4. Delay after delay.
5. The just plain ludicrous decisions.  Perhaps transparency would clear these up.
6. The fact that most decisions made by BFL seem completely arbitrary, and nothing... NOTHING pisses off customers more than arbitrary decision making.  When your actions are not predictable in a given situation, you are wrong.  Period.

So while this post is nice and all, I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish other than to distract from the real issues surrounding BFL.  My situation, that has been on going since October 2012, is still unresolved.  I am not the only one in this situation and there are plenty of others in similar situations. 

...
Maybe this is the wrong thread to bring any of this up, but I don't want people to be distracted by this kind of thread from the real issue of BFL being unable to meet their obligations to even moderate sized customers, especially when you are trying to gain new customers who will end up completely screwed when the BFL house of cards comes crashing down.

Sound familiar? Well, it is 

...
The real problem here is, as has already been at least partially mentioned:

1. The lack of transparency in the process.
2. The lack of communication.
3. The lies and false promises made by MTGox Support Staff with regards to AML/KYC.
4. Delay after delay, ostensibly under the guise of AML.
5. The just plain ludicrous decisions (Goat as an example).  Perhaps transparency would clear these up.
6. The fact that most decisions made by MTGox seem completely arbitrary, and nothing... NOTHING pisses off customers more than arbitrary decision making.  When your actions are not predictable in a given situation, you are wrong.  Period.

So while this post is nice and all, I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish other than to distract from the real issues surrounding MTGox.  My situation, that has been on going since April, is still unresolved.  I am not the only one in this situation and there are plenty of others in similar situations. 

...
Maybe this is the wrong thread to bring any of this up, but I don't want people to be distracted by this kind of thread from the real issue of MTGox being unable to meet their obligations to even moderate sized customers, especially when you are trying to gain new customers who will end up completely screwed when the Gox house of cards comes crashing down.

Nice to see that Josh Zerlan / Inaba has the same problems with MtGox that the Bitcoin community has with him and BFL.

Is it a Bitcoin issue that it attracts so many felons and scumbags? Or is BFL only one black sheep?

I more and more come to the conclusion that this unregulated Bitcoin Wild West Cowboy territory will finally eat itself.

[Bicknellski]