Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs.

[deslok]

I for one am sure I'll be buying the first aisc that the community produces capable of this. Although I'm somewhat amazed no aisc for something like sha hashing it's available already. Then again cpus are probably enough for servers that encrypt their data using it... Out of curiosity has anyone thought about what chips the self encrypting hard drives use?

[1715279810]

1715279810

[1715279810]

1715279810

[kloinko1n]

Search for the term FPGA - this has already been discussed at length in there. The FPGA people already have working implementations. The big impediment to ASIC implementation is the cost not the talent on these forums.

I think there as been a misunderstanding. If not, then I apologize. But, I do not intend to simply release the design, as an "open source" file. I intend to finance the construction of a batch of ASICs chip based on a design, and sell them at cost-to-produce. So that miners can use them.

Highly interested

[Pentium100]

An ASIC would be interesting, provided it does not cost a lot. Also, selling the ASICs would be good business, since if the ASIC outperforms GPU (which it will, most likely), everyone will start using them and those who still use GPUs will fall behind, since the difficulty will increase, much in the same way as with GPU vs CPU mining in the past.

If the cost is comparable to a GPU (or at least a PC with the GPU), including shipping to Lithuania, I'll most likely buy some. It's always fun to play with electronics.

[JoelKatz]

I've done the back-of-the-envelope math on this. It is doable. The problem is the up front cost is around $2,000,000 to do it right.

The target ASIC would use the fully-unrolled design that's already used by the FPGA miner. The design goal would be to fit 4 fully-unrolled miners on a chip. The target frequency would be around 350Mhz, one double-hash per miner per clock. That would mean 1.4GHash/s per chip if all goals are met. The chip would draw around 50W. You could put four on a card and connect it to a USB port.

The cost per ASIC would be under $100 plus a share of the development costs. So it all comes down to how many chips you can make/sell. That would give you a 5.6GHash/s mining peripheral for around $650 including baseboard, cooling, power supply, and so on, but not including the cost of development.

To have it make business sense to borrow money to fund the development (assuming you could even arrange it), you'd have to be able to sell the miners for $1,500 each or so and you'd have to be able to sell 5,000 units. I think people would pay $1,500 for 5.6GHash/s at 250W, but I'm not sure 5,000 units would sell, especially as early sales raise the difficulty. (And if that happened, the total network hashing power would jump to three times what it is now!)

[markm]

It would probably be useful to make an entry-level unit with just one chip on the card, as the lower you keep the cost of entry the more sales you will probably be able to make.

-MarkM-

[NetTecture]

I doubt

The main problem will be price - comared to the 7xxx AMD series.

But if htaht is ok, I would take some. Currently setting up a not too small operation.

[deslok]

Has anyone considered the engineering may be partly done I've seen a few things like these with hardware sha units.

[JoelKatz]

Has anyone considered the engineering may be partly done I've seen a few things like these with hardware sha units.

They're designed for a different purpose. Here, the goal is not to do a SHA as quickly as possible or over a large amount of data but to perform a particular operation requiring two SHAs on a small amount of data as many times as possible concurrently. The FPGA miner already has the basic design -- it can do one double hash per clock cycle (per instance). It's just a question of how high the clock speed can be and how many of them can fit on an single ASIC. (I'm oversimplifying a bit, but the general point is sound.)

The current design uses an assembly line approach. While SHA step 5 is being done on none 12, SHA step 4 is being done on nonce 13, and SHA step 3 is being done on nonce 14. Nonces come in the front from a counter and once the pipeline is full, complete once per clock cycle. The actual SHA logical operations would be wires on the chip. Each SHA XOR would be an XOR gate. I don't think you can do better than that.

[skyhigh]

Posting so I can follow this thread...

JoelKatz, you seem to know a lot on this subject.  If I understand you correctly a $2 mill investment would resulted in a card with 4 ASICs 1.4GHash/s per chip at 50 W each, for a total 5.6 GHash/s 250 W  USB plug unit. Production cost would be $650 each. Would you care to comment on why this would cost up to $2 mill to do it right.

Did anyone do the math if this is done and sold for $1500 each if the math holds up and this would be a good investment for miners? Problem I instantly see is the difference between fist 1000 units sold  versus the last 1000 units sold, because in the meantime difficulty factor would double if not triple, while the product would still sell for the same price.

[JoelKatz]

JoelKatz, you seem to know a lot on this subject.  If I understand you correctly a $2 mill investment would resulted in a card with 4 ASICs 1.4GHash/s per chip at 50 W each, for a total 5.6 GHash/s 250 W  USB plug unit. Production cost would be $650 each. Would you care to comment on why this would cost up to $2 mill to do it right.

Correct. To do it right would require designing a fully-custom ASIC and having it manufactured on a high-end fabrication line capable of producing chips with hundreds of millions of transistors running at 350MHz. Every step in that process, and there are many of them, costs money. (1/4 of the cost is salary, by the way.)

Essentially, an ASIC would mean a chip produced in almost precisely the same manner as the way a high-end GPU was produced four years ago, except it would be designed for bitcoin mining from the ground up.

Did anyone do the math if this is done and sold for $1500 each if the math holds up and this would be a good investment for miners? Problem I instantly see is the difference between fist 1000 units sold  versus the last 1000 units sold, because in the meantime difficulty factor would double if not triple, while the product would still sell for the same price.

The numbers are solid, the problem is the uncertainty. Also, every unit you sell is weakening your market.

[Jack of Diamonds]

@JoelKatz

5.6ghash at 250 watts definitely makes business sense for miners as well at $1500.
I'd replace all my rigs, stop paying datacenter rent and run those at home.

But can a USB port (even a reinforced one) actually supply 50 watts let alone 250w? My biggest doubt.

[NetTecture]

Irrelevant. YOu can always put in a power supply. Actually no, USB can not power 50 watt.

That said, I would NOT stop my datacenter operation plans - I would rpelace cards with more asics

[skyhigh]

If I understand him correctly, this card would have its own power supply, USB port would only be used for PC connection.

[JoelKatz]

But can a USB port (even a reinforced one) actually supply 50 watts let alone 250w? My biggest doubt.

The USB port is strictly for work units to the ASICs and shares back to the PC. It would need its own power supply, cooling, and so on. The bandwidth needed to and from the unit is negligible. Essentially, it would need a stream of work units of 8KB every 12 seconds from the PC and return a share, about 300 bytes, about every second. A serial port would work as well. (Sorry, out of time. Numbers not double-checked. Hope I made no mistakes.)

[hugolp]

But can a USB port (even a reinforced one) actually supply 50 watts let alone 250w? My biggest doubt.

The USB port is strictly for work units to the ASICs and shares back to the PC. It would need its own power supply, cooling, and so on. The bandwidth needed to and from the unit is negligible. Essentially, it would need a stream of work units of 8KB every 12 seconds from the PC and return a share, about 300 bytes, about every second. A serial port would work as well. (Sorry, out of time. Numbers not double-checked. Hope I made no mistakes.)

Since you are counting $400 for 4 chips and $150 for the rest (for a total of $650) would it be posible to include a chipset that allowed a ethernet connection and a very simple webserver (like the chipset in a home router) instead of the usb chipset. This way you could have an independent device just connected to the ethernet network and configured by a simple web interface. Im not very informed about the prices but I dont think it would push the cost too much and it would avoid the need for a computer (saving energy and money). The question I guess is if that simple chipset could handle the mining software load.

[JoelKatz]

Since you are counting $400 for 4 chips and $150 for the rest (for a total of $650) would it be posible to include a chipset that allowed a ethernet connection and a very simple webserver (like the chipset in a home router) instead of the usb chipset. This way you could have an independent device just connected to the ethernet network and configured by a simple web interface. Im not very informed about the prices but I dont think it would push the cost too much and it would avoid the need for a computer (saving energy and money). The question I guess is if that simple chipset could handle the mining software load.

It could be done. The chipset would just need to be able to talk to a mining controller, which could be the bitcoin client for solo mining. The work that needs to be done beyond the hashing is minimal. The equivalent of a $40 wireless router would do it.

[MoonShadow]

Since you are counting $400 for 4 chips and $150 for the rest (for a total of $650) would it be posible to include a chipset that allowed a ethernet connection and a very simple webserver (like the chipset in a home router) instead of the usb chipset. This way you could have an independent device just connected to the ethernet network and configured by a simple web interface. Im not very informed about the prices but I dont think it would push the cost too much and it would avoid the need for a computer (saving energy and money). The question I guess is if that simple chipset could handle the mining software load.

It could be done. The chipset would just need to be able to talk to a mining controller, which could be the bitcoin client for solo mining. The work that needs to be done beyond the hashing is minimal. The equivalent of a $40 wireless router would do it.

Stack a bunch of these into a baseboard heater fan case, and allow me to control it with an external thermostat, and I would buy it today.

[Alex Beckenham]

I've never really mined, other than 0.01 btc off an old GPU that took me 24 hours to generate.

But even I'd be interested in mining if I could buy 56 GHash/s for $15k.

Just need to figure out a way to direct the resulting heat into my swimming pool.

[hugolp]

What about financing it through shares? I mean, creating a sort of a cooperative that pays dividends in cards, so people pay the money and at the end when it is developed they get payed in cards. That way you are making sure you will get a number of sales before starting the project. Sort of like testing the waters to know if the demand is there.

[NetTecture]

What about professional

Willing to commit to a 10.000 USD per month purchase for 6 months, providing the conomics is better than the 7xxx graphcis card looks like. Bank guarantee can be provided