[VIDEO] Butterfly Labs (BFL) Bitforce SC ASIC Test

[Frankie Delaney]

Well this is a small step in the right direction.
Maybe after 15 or 20 videos showing steady progress, I might believe they will ship something able to hash at some point in the future.

$30,000 dollars spent on a mini-rig last summer would have bought 5000 bitcoins. Those 5000 BTC would be worth $455,000 today.
BFL has some catching up to do.

I don't remember where the list is, but some guy bought 4 minirigs on june 23rd, when the price would have been $6.40/BTC. That $120,000 invested in bitcoins instead of butterflies would be worth $1.71 million dollars. Or alternatively, it would have bought 185 4 module avalons good for 15.8TH/s, as opposed to the 6TH/s he might get if BFL ever ships something.

[SebastianJu]

Well this is a small step in the right direction.
Maybe after 15 or 20 videos showing steady progress, I might believe they will ship something able to hash at some point in the future.

$30,000 dollars spent on a mini-rig last summer would have bought 5000 bitcoins. Those 5000 BTC would be worth $455,000 today.
BFL has some catching up to do.

I don't remember where the list is, but some guy bought 4 minirigs on june 23rd, when the price would have been $6.40/BTC. That $120,000 invested in bitcoins instead of butterflies would be worth $1.71 million dollars. Or alternatively, it would have bought 185 4 module avalons good for 15.8TH/s, as opposed to the 6TH/s he might get if BFL ever ships something.

Lets hope he had way more than that. Otherwise it would be really a pity.

[PuertoLibre]

Great. They are now in the prototype stage.

LOL

The guy in the video sounds like an apologetic scam artist....where do I know his voice from?

42 at idle and 160watt at full crank? Sounds like they missed their power targets if you ask me....

Just like the FPGA launch....

I don't remember hearing the guy say how many GH/s it was doing.

[PuertoLibre]

42W at idle?  Good lawd.  My x6500 FPGAs only burns up 17.2W at full load...

Didn't they like...put a dummy load in place of the ASIC chips and actually test these boards or something while they were waiting on chip delivery?

I guess not.

It was the engineering teams fault for not thinking of it?

[johnyj]

Well this is a small step in the right direction.
Maybe after 15 or 20 videos showing steady progress, I might believe they will ship something able to hash at some point in the future.

$30,000 dollars spent on a mini-rig last summer would have bought 5000 bitcoins. Those 5000 BTC would be worth $455,000 today.
BFL has some catching up to do.

I don't remember where the list is, but some guy bought 4 minirigs on june 23rd, when the price would have been $6.40/BTC. That $120,000 invested in bitcoins instead of butterflies would be worth $1.71 million dollars. Or alternatively, it would have bought 185 4 module avalons good for 15.8TH/s, as opposed to the 6TH/s he might get if BFL ever ships something.

Time travel trading is not relevant, if bitcoin today worth only $2 due to some severe bug in software, that guy can celebrate that he made the right decision to spend the coin before the price crashed

[BitcoinINV]

Great. They are now in the prototype stage.

LOL

They guy in the video sounds like an apologetic scam artist....where do I know his voice from?

42 at idle and 160watt at full crank? Sounds like they missed their power targets if you ask me....

Just like the FPGA launch....

I don't remember hearing the guy say how many GH/s it was doing.

No he just said they were doing what they were supposed to.... I guess they were all just supposed turn on lmfao?

[Dargo]

Well this is a small step in the right direction.
Maybe after 15 or 20 videos showing steady progress, I might believe they will ship something able to hash at some point in the future.

$30,000 dollars spent on a mini-rig last summer would have bought 5000 bitcoins. Those 5000 BTC would be worth $455,000 today.
BFL has some catching up to do.

I don't remember where the list is, but some guy bought 4 minirigs on june 23rd, when the price would have been $6.40/BTC. That $120,000 invested in bitcoins instead of butterflies would be worth $1.71 million dollars. Or alternatively, it would have bought 185 4 module avalons good for 15.8TH/s, as opposed to the 6TH/s he might get if BFL ever ships something.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0

gigavps bought 4 minirigs. My memory is that bitlane also bought 4, but don't see him on the list now, so maybe he cancelled.

[willphase]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0

gigavps bought 4 minirigs. My memory is that bitlane also bought 4, but don't see him on the list now, so maybe he cancelled.

gigavps probably already had (at least) four FPGA minirigs, so deciding to upgrade at the time was a no-brainer since he could get full price on each FPGA rig off each ASIC rig - and incidentally, mining on four minirigs in that time has probably made him around 10,000 BTC so I'm sure he's not complaining too hard.

Will

[PuertoLibre]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *dies*

So they've tested that the board can handle the data. They are still to:

Actually have a chip
Actually make the chip work
Actually bin the chip
Sort out the communication protocols, never mind proper USB interfaces etc
Get the power consumption down to ANYTHING near what they promised
Actually make it hash
Actually make it hash to the required speed
Actually make it hash consistently
Actually make it hashable 24/7
Actually prevent it overheating [That's 160W TDP on the equivalent of a dual slot GPU, which would typically warrant ~40CFM - they have 0, AND will be placing many in a an enclosed case]
Work out how to do the power distribution
Make the shit fit in the cases.
Work out sufficient testing algorithms and the logistics of burning in '300 units a day'
Sort out the logistics of labelling, warranties, who gets what.
Actually deliver anything that works for more than a few days.



ETA 5 months, GG.

The red part...

That is what I thought about when Inaba/Josh used to gloat about it's size. The funny pics of the FPGA were interesting with the fans beneath...

But on another point...anyone noticed that the heat sink was seemingly the aluminum one (for Mini-Single) and not the other variety of copper type the Single SC ASIC has.

I played this twice and I noticed that the person (Josh?) behind the camera fails to mention which rig this is. From the aluminum I am going to guess it is a Mini-Single @ 160watts.

Add a PC and you've got 300 watts. Does this imply the Single will be twice as hot with it's copper heat-sink? Now we have a clue as to the reason for the silence.....

------------------

As for the blue...I think the Mini-rigs are going to need quite a few power outlets if that is the case.

[PuertoLibre]

Im confused....
Now, Im not that versed in power circuitry ... but how the hell can the PCB power circuitry design be so shitty that the board itself is using nearly 2x the power than the chip? iirc the SC was supposed to be like 60watts right? The whole unit is using 150ish .. how the fuck can the board be using 90watts?!?!?
Did some noob engineer design the board or some shit? I mean really.

April fools?

[k9quaint]

Well this is a small step in the right direction.
Maybe after 15 or 20 videos showing steady progress, I might believe they will ship something able to hash at some point in the future.

$30,000 dollars spent on a mini-rig last summer would have bought 5000 bitcoins. Those 5000 BTC would be worth $455,000 today.
BFL has some catching up to do.

I don't remember where the list is, but some guy bought 4 minirigs on june 23rd, when the price would have been $6.40/BTC. That $120,000 invested in bitcoins instead of butterflies would be worth $1.71 million dollars. Or alternatively, it would have bought 185 4 module avalons good for 15.8TH/s, as opposed to the 6TH/s he might get if BFL ever ships something.

Time travel trading is not relevant, if bitcoin today worth only $2 due to some severe bug in software, that guy can celebrate that he made the right decision to spend the coin before the price crashed

This is not time travel trading. This is examining people who were trying to bet on BTC (who instead bet on magical thinking). I was pointing out that there was a very simple way to bet on BTC available to them at the time. Had they taken that simple bet, they would be millionaires.

[PuertoLibre]

Yay! they are not a scam at least. This means they'll eventually ship a product.

fyi: we reached that stage 1.2 month before we shipped. Let's see how they handle their remainder issues.

Someday you should let your customer know just how the development of the Avalon device had to go through to get to this point. I wouldn't mind hearing the backstory of how it came together.

[repentance]

The only party surprised by higher power usage appears to be BFL itself.. even after they failed to do correct estimates for their FPGAs.

<insert history repetition quote>

The "surprise" seems to be coming from the fact that it's only happening with one wafer - the one which was packaged.  It hasn't occurred with the tests they ran on the raw chips.  The question is whether wafers 3-6 will have the same problem - if they do, exactly why the packaged chips are having the problem and the raw chips aren't needs to be identified.

I vaguely recall Yifu predicting early this year that BFL would encounter this issue and I'm curious about why he thought this was the case. Also, were those who commented on the images of the packaged chips and said that the fill job was crappy seeing something which could be contributing to this issue?

That BFL is having issues shouldn't be surprising - the point of testing is to discover and resolve issues.  The problem stems more from them having consistently underestimated the time it will take them to solve any given issue.  I doubt they can realistically estimate when this one might be resolved and when "revised" units will be available - and that's a critical question because the bulk of their orders won't be filled from Batch 1 and 2.

[Tamerz]

I vaguely recall Yifu predicting early this year that BFL would encounter this issue and I'm curious about why he thought this was the case.

I remember this as well. Like they ran into the same thing early on.

[Dargo]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0

gigavps bought 4 minirigs. My memory is that bitlane also bought 4, but don't see him on the list now, so maybe he cancelled.

gigavps probably already had (at least) four FPGA minirigs, so deciding to upgrade at the time was a no-brainer since he could get full price on each FPGA rig off each ASIC rig - and incidentally, mining on four minirigs in that time has probably made him around 10,000 BTC so I'm sure he's not complaining too hard.

Will

I agree - didn't intend to suggest gigvps was hurting, just that he is the only 4 minirig purchase according to the list.

[marra]

so this proves mini rigs are still a fiction... at 5KW it can't fit in regular power supply switch, at least not in europe, 3.5 KW max per fuse...

[beekeeper]

[BitSyncom]

I vaguely recall Yifu predicting early this year that BFL would encounter this issue and I'm curious about why he thought this was the case.

I remember this as well. Like they ran into the same thing early on.

not really, what I said was we also ran simulations for 65nm, and based on our results we knew they will run into this problem, and some other ones I shall not mention.

[itcamefrommars]

Give BFL a break everyone!  They're still waiting on their batch 2 avalon to arrive so that they can open it up and see how it's really done!
Now you can blame avalon for bfl's delay.  That and radio shack not having better than 7xxxseries reg's.

What really bugs me is the parted together feeling of generic USB hubs in daisy chained in the minirig (or what ever it's called... I'm starting to unconsciously block out anything BFL from my brain)  That's a dirt cheap and simple circuit to make well under the cost of purchased ones even at alibaba prices or china street prices ... or was that when they were just showing the prototype of the case with nothing of value.  At least the minirig doesn't look like a spray painted AppleTV or Macmini.

Avalon... when are you going to help these poor guys out ?  lol... you might save a lot of bfl customers from suicide/divorce/PTSD/unpaid mortgages/unpaid student loans/second jobs/etc... it'd be like mining for karma 

 

[witherworth]

Well this is a small step in the right direction.
Maybe after 15 or 20 videos showing steady progress, I might believe they will ship something able to hash at some point in the future.

$30,000 dollars spent on a mini-rig last summer would have bought 5000 bitcoins. Those 5000 BTC would be worth $455,000 today.
BFL has some catching up to do.

I don't remember where the list is, but some guy bought 4 minirigs on june 23rd, when the price would have been $6.40/BTC. That $120,000 invested in bitcoins instead of butterflies would be worth $1.71 million dollars. Or alternatively, it would have bought 185 4 module avalons good for 15.8TH/s, as opposed to the 6TH/s he might get if BFL ever ships something.

Time travel trading is not relevant, if bitcoin today worth only $2 due to some severe bug in software, that guy can celebrate that he made the right decision to spend the coin before the price crashed

This is not time travel trading. This is examining people who were trying to bet on BTC (who instead bet on magical thinking). I was pointing out that there was a very simple way to bet on BTC available to them at the time. Had they taken that simple bet, they would be millionaires.

Except you've got to take into account what a person would actually do. For myself, I wouldn't have invested in BTC itself, expecting the price to rise (I've actually been expecting it to fall). I did invest in hardware, because I know that I'll get returns on it eventually (even if it did take many months), and I felt it was a safer bet than buying BTC upright. Therefore, had I not invested in BFL hardware, I wouldn't have invested in BTC, and therefore didn't lose out on anything.

Arguing that I still have some lost profit would be like me arguing that the dollar you could have given to that homeless guy you passed is a lost investment because you didn't realize that he used that dollar to buy a lottery ticket and felt obligated to thank you back for your kindness by giving you thousands of dollars in return. It just doesn't make sense.