GekkoScience is now dabbling with 16nm ASICs for new designs

[Biodom]

unfortunately, XP days are almost over as almost no browsers can be installed or updated.
At least on my copy chrome requires manual download for updates, which is a nuisance.
I don't have problems with 7; 10, however, is something else entirely.
It is incredibly naggy to the point of being obnoxious.
If i had a choice of using win 10 all the time and using no PC at all, i would most likely choose no PC.

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[JaredKaragen]

Presently on my dedicated miners I install the windows 10 freely available ISO, and install it, run DWS, and never activate windows itself..  I don't care that I can't customize my machine or disable that watermark;  I don't even plug in a terminal unless I need to admin it for some reason.

Uptimes are impressive, like 7 was on my last machine....

I have had lots of success with 10;  especially after getting DWS.  Just make sure you un-block some of the domains added to the hosts list as to not nerf Skype if you use skype.  Skype is now dependent on some IE/edge libraries/servers.  I am almost about to switch COIP carriers because of this.  I don't like leaving a telemetry port/site unblocked.

[toptek]

some might like this

https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/f/web-protection-web-filtering-application-visibility-control/47019/here-s-how-to-block-windows-10-spying/171857?pi2132219849=709&pi2132219853=2


and mainly why i use 10

Uptimes are impressive, like 7 was

[spazzdla]

I have old S3's and S1's.. how difficult will it be to implement these boards onto an S3?

Will the S3 controller run the boards?  


I am excited for these pod miners!!  I hope they run with windows XP lol. I fail at mastering raspbin or Linux... I can only windows .

if he is able to do like he wants to : take off the old board and put the new upgraded board back on , i think he said he wouldn't reuse those controllers and make it easier for everyone to use..

and please excuse me for not wanting somethings that will set, i deleted that comment didn't think it really mattered, i guess it does to some .


why XP ? .   or is that a joke ? .

I suck with Linux, I have a windows xp cd I use on my old computer, I am using that as my bitcoin miner controller lol!!   Xp is also awesome sauce. I would still use xp if I could for my new comp. 

[VirosaGITS]

re these ^^^ thoughts, EDIT: which are now deleted, so the rest does not make much sense anymore

sticks project is to raise money for BF stuff, this has been articulated plenty.
If you don't want sticks, that's fine.

Would I be too much out of line to suggest that those who buy 2Pac sticks might be considered first in line (so to speak) for boards or any other BF products, otherwise some people are just piggybacking, essentially?
The decision is with sidehack, I just voice my 2c.

On the other hand, if we will have a gazillion of these things (BF), the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.

I'm going to assume you yourself bought 2-chips sticks;

The same was suggested for people, like me, who bought the first sticks (last year and the "club" died) and we still havent gotten any pods nor a S# upgrade kit and i'm not posting around telling who should get what first. Your comments seem a bit self-serving.

If sidehack want to raise money and there is a desire to favor early backers, then sidehack should run something akin to kickstarting for funding, and make a list of contributors. But i don't see him doing that atm, so i think its a bit early to try to secure one's place in line.

[Biodom]

re these ^^^ thoughts, EDIT: which are now deleted, so the rest does not make much sense anymore

sticks project is to raise money for BF stuff, this has been articulated plenty.
If you don't want sticks, that's fine.

Would I be too much out of line to suggest that those who buy 2Pac sticks might be considered first in line (so to speak) for boards or any other BF products, otherwise some people are just piggybacking, essentially?
The decision is with sidehack, I just voice my 2c.

On the other hand, if we will have a gazillion of these things (BF), the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot.

I'm going to assume you yourself bought 2-chips sticks;

The same was suggested for people, like me, who bought the first sticks (last year and the "club" died) and we still havent gotten any pods nor a S# upgrade kit and i'm not posting around telling who should get what first. Your comments seem a bit self-serving.

If sidehack want to raise money and there is a desire to favor early backers, then sidehack should run something akin to kickstarting for funding, and make a list of contributors. But i don't see him doing that atm, so i think its a bit early to try to secure one's place in line.

my comments were actually directed toward someone who had comments below yours (he already deleted his comments), there was nothing there that specifically relates to you.
consider it a proposal from the bystander.
if sidehack does not want to do that, he won't (with 99.9% probability), I recon.

[gt_addict]

Not causing an arguement but a couple of us who may not be buying the 2pac or biggie gear have already contributed a little by buying the BW sticks and other gear sidehack auctioned off in October and have also changed our signatures to try and help raise some awareness around the forum of what sidehack is trying to do.

Personally I'm holding out for the Bitfury pods as I'm only a hobby miner and with my electricity cost it's the only viable option just to break even.

But I understand your point and everyone is entitled their opinion. This is a forum after all 

[sidehack]

I do really appreciate everyone with the signature ads. I've never bought into a signature campaign though I've been asked once or twice, and I'm not paying anyone to advertise on my behalf either - folks are just doing it on their own. That's pretty cool.

I don't know about discounts for "early supporters" or anything; a lot of them are people I like (which is to say, people I've done favorable business with and generally get along with) - including Biodom, one of my earliest hosting customers who has gone out of his way to help me out on several occasions. His support is part of the reason I'm still in business right now, as his advice and assistance have helped me out of a pickle or two in the last few years. There are several folks like that who have helped me out, and I try to take care of them in return.

I don't want to say I don't appreciate every sale that comes in, but I'm not really organized enough (or have the available time to organize enough, my to-do list is already filling a blackboard) to do favors for everyone. In general, I set my prices about as low as I'm willing to sell for. Folks are sometimes upset that there's no bulk discount on stickminers, well even the guy who buys one is getting the best price I'm willing to offer. That's how it goes.

I'm sorry there hasn't been more progress on Bitfury stuff yet. 2Pac dev took longer than I thought it would - not nearly as long as starting from scratch, since a lot of it was built on Compac dev from last year 2015, which remember took something like 5 months before I was shipping product. I'm doing my best to track down helpers so I can get manufacturing done quicker and still have dev time, and that's going to really determine how quickly anything happens on new gear.

Good news is, Biggie pod dev should be pretty limited - even more so than 2Pac was, since a lot of 2Pac hangup was getting VH enough resources to write a freakin' sweet driver. He did his job so well that it should pretty much natively support a Biggie out of the box. Hardware design for the Biggie was almost entirely just figuring out layout, part of which was basically defining a form-factor to use on future pods.

That kind of front-loading strategy will be used on BF16 gear as well. The BF16 Compac as planned will incorporate most of the same features as the BF16 pod; the power system will be based on existing Compac/2Pac but the controls set will be all new, and most of the controls parts are the same between BFPac and the BFPod. The S1 refit boards are intended to basically be three BFPods on a single board, with a common controller. This means once the BFPac is ready, the BFPod is 90% done and when the BFPod is ready the S1 refit is 90% done. I've already got a test layout (and PCBs) for the BF16 Compac, in a more open and tweakable form than the high-density stick, so the bulk of design work from here on will be programming - both in firmware and the cgminer driver. Just gotta find time to do it.
I was hoping to be all over that next week, but I just got a giant PSU order which, although I do appreciate the revenue, will probably chew up a solid 3 days.

2Pac heatsinks I'm told have shipped, which means I've got PCBs and about one other thing still inbound before I can start manufacture of those. Should be no delays on getting started. Biggie PCB will probably have to wait until tomorrow; I've been meaning all week to get that checked out and ordered but I keep getting stuck with other stuff (see note about length of to-do list above).

So, that's a general update.

[takagari]

REally waiting on those pods, need some beta testers?

[QuintLeo]

unfortunately, XP days are almost over as almost no browsers can be installed or updated.

 No updates is a nuisance, but they can all be installed - just not always THE most recent version.

 What's really irritating is that AMD essentially stopped XP support close to 3 YEARS before Mickey$loth finally got around to it - while NVidia supported XP for at least a few months PAST M$ dropping it.
 There's a REASON my remaining XP "older games" gaming and media systems sport NVidia cards now (first once I had bought in many years at the time I bought them).

[QuintLeo]

Uptimes are impressive, like 7 was on my last machine....

 I haven't been impressed by uptime on ANY Windows system I've worked with - a couple of the older "server" versions could achieve TOLERABLE uptimes (NT 3.51 SP5 was THE BEST on that by a wide margin), but no Windows system I've EVER worked with can even come close to the literal DECADES of uptime I've seen out of some of my older Slackware systems (which literally have never seen downtime except for power outage, hardware failure, or I had to shut them down to physically move them in the case of literally DOZENS of systems).

 I finally retired my ancient AMD K5 based systems last summer strictly because I didn't have the space to MOVE them, and their performance was low enough to not be worth the hassle of trying to MAKE space for them - those systems dated back to the mid-1990s, and the ONLY one that ever had downtime happened when I accidentially deleted the entire /bin directory - yet it kept running anyway just couldn't START any new processes 'till I shut it down to move it and had to reinstall.

 Appx. 20 YEARS of performance with ZERO downtime on 14 systems that were constantly running the DNet client or the Prime95 client during their entire existance, among other things (keep in mind that a lot of sites used to use those programs for STRESS TESTING on hardware) - show me a Windows system that can even THINK about claiming 2 years uptime before you even think about talking "impressive uptime".


 The BEST I've ever seen out of Windows was a little under 2 years out of a Dell server at a place I worked for a while, running NT 3.51 SP5 and not doing a lot of heavy work (fairly simple web server and ftp server for driver downloads).

[toptek]

Uptimes to me doesn't mean or have to mean running for days at a time or years it can mean, when you use the PC, may be impressive was a bit strong but I'm impressed with 10 over any windows,expect for the bloat which no one wants ,  i started out with Dos ... and we all have our idea of how things should be or are is that better .... I honestly thought he was kidding that's very rarely seen any more mostly you see windows 7 which i wouldn't have said a thing and may be I should have kept quite any way, i wasn't making fun  but...from time to time in  DR offices I see them using XP in a room storing some kind of unimportant info or run a low level program they can't replace  that runs . the last place i saw a XP box was in a DR's office they were about to thrash that no longer booted or was stuck at boot complaining about the Hard drive... 9 month ago.


VISTA to me was the worst windows ever  ME was better , and ME was pretty bad ...


SORRY side i Won't go off topic any way more my bad ....

thanks top ....

[VirosaGITS]

Cheers, then Biodom, keep it up. And thanks for the details sidehack. I'd totally throw in all S5's boards i have right now if i didnt (need?) use some of them to keep warm in the winter

[Waldezz]

Hello,
I would like to ask how it looks with bitshopper.de. When will it be possible to pre-order 2Pac in Europe?

[isoneguy]

Uptimes to me doesn't mean or have to mean running for days at a time or years it can mean, when you use the PC, may be impressive was a bit strong but I'm impressed with 10 over any windows,expect for the bloat which no one wants ,  i started out with Dos ... and we all have our idea of how things should be or are is that better .... I honestly thought he was kidding that's very rarely seen any more mostly you see windows 7 which i wouldn't have said a thing and may be I should have kept quite any way, i wasn't making fun  but...from time to time in  DR offices I see them using XP in a room storing some kind of unimportant info or run a low level program they can't replace  that runs . the last place i saw a XP box was in a DR's office they were about to thrash that no longer booted or was stuck at boot complaining about the Hard drive... 9 month ago.


VISTA to me was the worst windows ever  ME was better , and ME was pretty bad ...


SORRY side i Won't go off topic any way more my bad ....

thanks top ....

I actually like 2 features about win8, it has drivers for everything...and you can swap harddrives between computers without having to reinstall for each machine.

[adaseb]

Estimated Next Difficulty:   390,713,030,698 (+15.97%)


Looks like this will be the highest difficulty jump since last February, crazy nuts.

So this is Bitfury and Bitmain chips that are following this huge increase?

[sidehack]

Finally got around to building a test 2Pac with good chips. The first 3 test sticks (used by VH for driver dev) were built with out-of-spec rejects from Compac manufacture, meaning they ran hot or poorly from the get-go and wouldn't be representative of the performance of a stock manufactured stick.

Yesterday I got the robot set up to run out 2Pacs, today I did a bit of dabbling with voltage ranges on the buck. I had noted that these guys don't particularly like to initialize below about 630mV per node even though at low frequencies (100MHz) they should be good to 600mV, but at the bottom threshold of voltage, chip power draw balance and node-level storage matters a whole heck of a lot. So I figured up buck voltage adjustment resistors that'll give you 630mV to about 830mV, which means it should be good for at least 400MHz.

I ran a quick efficiency test, only up to 300MHz because my USB power meter is only rated for 3A.

Freq	GH	Vcore	Power	J/GH
100	11.00	1.26	3.67	0.33
125	13.75	1.26	4.48	0.33
150	16.50	1.26	5.27	0.32
175	19.25	1.26	6.12	0.32
200	22.00	1.32	7.43	0.34
225	24.75	1.36	8.73	0.35
250	27.50	1.40	10.11	0.37
275	30.25	1.46	12.25	0.40
300	33.00	1.50	13.98	0.42

As you can see, efficiency across the bottom end of frequencies is pretty flat. That's because they're all at the same voltage level. Efficiency actually improves slightly with an increase in frequency because the maintenance current (buck controller, LDOs, CP2102 etc) is pretty constant so a higher proportion of power is used for mining.

At 300MHz, the total device efficiency is only about 15% worse than the datasheet chip-level efficiency, which I think is pretty good for a stick miner. It also puts up over 30GH, which I think is pretty darn good for a stickminer. Note this is about the same power draw the original Compac expected to see at 22GH, so we're seeing a 50% improvement in hashrate. If the stick could be pushed to 400MHz you'd see it drawing about 23W for 44GH, but I don't want to test this until I have a bit stouter measurement tool.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Sounding REAL good there!

[sidehack]

It should also be encouraging that the BF16 stickminer will use the same power system (different voltage range of course) and formfactor, just with upgraded controls. So if this guy is comfortable up above 13W, think what'll happen when it's got 0.1J/GH chips instead of 0.4J/GH chips. The BF16 stick could be most of an S1 by itself.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

The BF16 stick could be most of an S1 by itself.

Now that in itself is statement to how fast mining ASIC's have evolved