BlockBurner LLC - Crucible FPGA Scrypt Miner - Announcement Aug-19

[pizza]

Just speaking on purchasing part, only and only if it is cheaper than a gpu or equal pricing. End of the day someone could care less about the $50 extra per month in electricity compared to the cost of the FPGA. The break even point would be years depending on the price of it.

For example I can get a 7950 hashing for numbers sake at 600mh/sec at $300
The quad miner which does about 800mh/sec is sold for $1,069

In this example if you could offer 600mh/sec at say $400 is the only time I and probably many other people would consider it, other than that electricity costs don't justify spending over 200% for the device.

[Novus]

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Yes
2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Yep, I would definitely buy one due to the electricity rates where I live. I'll be willing to pay $0.8-$1 per kh/s or so.
3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
If the price falls into what I find reasonable, and I find the seller trustworthy.

[milly6]

it would have to be $0.6 or less per kh since you could achieve around that with simple gpu mining. I MIGHT buy one (no preorder plz) but i would rather buy the plans for building it myself.

[tacotime]

Anyone remember the value of BTC when FPGA's first appeared off hand?

I started open development of FPGA mining designs in May 2011; BTC was about $5USD at the time.  The first commercial FPGA mining products first appeared on August 18th, 2011, and BTC was about $10USD then.

Food for thought: scrypt as it is used in litecoin is not a memory-hard algorithm.  Rather, it's an algorithm with a space-time trade-off skewed towards using more space, given the current relative costs of memory fetches versus computations.  You can implement litecoin's scrypt with only a little over 2 kilobits of memory, but it runs ~512 times slower.

It's likely that a performant implementation will use a sparse LUT to cut down on fetches.  For example, with a 512 element LUT (instead of 1024), the algorithm performs 50% less fetches, and requires only one extra salsa round 50% of the time.

I think a simplistic port of the existing scrypt.c from the litecoin source code would just use 128KB of block RAM, which is readily available on most of the FPGA's already in circulation.   I can see how it might increase the area/cost of an ASIC, but for an FPGA  it's a non-issue.

It's not clear why people are even discussing external memory requirements for this algorithm and getting ready to write-off their purchased bitcoin boards.

Overall, it sounds like we should expect an FPGA implementation of litecoin to perform at (1/1024) the rate of equivalent bitcoin hash.  And this is due to the sequential loops, and not the "memory-hard" aspect of the algorithm.

The problem is that the on-device block RAM is insanely slow compared to GPU ram (about 10 times slower for most FPGAs).  The per slice block RAM for most FPGAs is also less than 128 KB (more like 8 KB in typical cases).

The tradeoff described above works (reducing the memory size a lot and just recreating the entire lookup table more often), but the performance decrease is usually so great that it's problematic.  If you can make the algorithm run in parallel better I think it may be possible to get into the high double digit KH/s or perhaps hundreds with an FPGA.  We'll have to see what LaSeek and friends come up with.

[wizzardTim]

Hello, my developing crypto-currency business, BlockBurner (mostly a blog atm, but more to come), is researching feasibility in the generation of a real FPGA Scrypt Litecoin mining appliance, specialized for the task much like the SHA256 FPGA's and ASIC's Bitcoin is about to begin running on.

To do this, there are a few things I need to know from the crypto-currency community, please answer each question if you respond to this post-

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?

2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
.
.

BlockBurner.net

1. It is ready. We' ve been talking and waiting for this a long time ago.
2. I would definately buy one if it's really worth it. It should be cheaper than GPUs, quickier and you should consider the difficulty rise.
3. I would, but only if you guarantee me about the hashes that it would produce.

TIA

[dan99]

yes, will buy one if price and hash rate are resonable

[evilscoop]

being more interested in fpga mining than gpu mining myself, which currently puts me off litecoin atm
If this could be done, and hash rate / price etc were reasonable, yes

[Operatr]

Awesome guys 

I am still researching into it and sourcing out an appropriate FPGA board that is more optimized for Scrypt than previous FPGA Bitcoin offerings.

I am very much interesting in persuing this further.

On the pre-order end, it would be the only way I could feasibly do it (banks wouldn't touch me with a 10 ft cattleprod...). I am working to get some pricing for a viable prototype to know where the cost to get started would stand, and following production. I assume as others they can be built on site easy enough.

Some of you have expressed deep knowledge of FPGA, I may be contacting you to build a dev team. Let me know if you might be interested in helping.

I am hoping by approaching a new company like this right here with all of you before just building some shady looking website populated with products for pre-order that in no way exist will alleviate scam concerns as we keep moving. We can all see this from the ground up. Nothing will be done at all without some realistic figures on the cost from prototype to production. Only in that case would I open it up, with you knowing 100% what your money is being used for with total transparency. Still that is a lot of trust in some random avatar on a forum, I agree. In roping in established and trusted community members and building my own credibility as well we can quench the scam alert and build a by-community for-community device.

A little more about me personally:

I am a long time computer and networking tech, primarily operating small-medium size IT infrastructures of all kinds. Over the last few years I have also added web development and graphic design work to my portfolio, as well as business tech consulting (aligning businesses with streamlined presence online and in house). My position in this would be mostly business logistics and organizing, though providing my technical expertise where needed as well to build the business support infrastructure.

My new company known as BlockBurner is just as new as any other, currently building my own Bitcoin/Litecoin mining farm as a 100% bootstrap effort on it's own that is in its infancy. Unlike most however, I have no pricing or products or services listed because I am realistic, and don't believe in what other mining operations are doing in this regard. If a product or service appears on my page, it will be because it actually exists and is ready to ship to the public at large as soon as you click "buy". I have no unrealistic expectations when it comes to trust, especially when there are so many scammers out there trying to cash in on enthusiast mania. (Im helping track these fly-by-night scam sites in fact because these people hurt the community and discourage adoption, which sucks) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=176262.msg1835276#msg1835276

More to come soon

Operatr

[Vorksholk]

I would certainly be interested in pre-ordering. Here's a bit of math (very simple) for people to chew on:

A GPU rig can be built, if you know what you are doing, and have it in a out-of-box setup with cheap CPU, mobo, etc, for around $1 per kH/s. For example, a 1.5-1.6kH/s system could be easily built for $1550 or so. The major advantage that FPGA units have over GPUs is not outright price ($1 per MH/s in Bitcoin mining for GPUs, BFL's 800MH/s unit cost around $700 if I remember correctly) but power consumption, often by close to an order of magnitude. As well, they are generally quieter, and their modular design allows for you to run many of them in a small area from one host computer. Some of the usual worries about GPUs such as heat dissipation are not as big of an issue with FPGAs.

After I got off on a tangent, I feel a fair price would be somewhere around $1/kH (per second, of course), as it would be competitive price-wise against GPUs while showing some major advantages, especially for people with expensive electricity, or without a room where they can put very noisy machines.

Cheers, best of luck with this project!

[crazy_rabbit]

A serious question would be- are FPGA's really necessary? What problems do they solve that GPU's don't already solve? FPGA's had an advantage in bitcoin only where cost per m/h was concerned, in total hashes- GPU cards still had more. I think there are probably few Litecoin farms (although this could change) and most LTC miners probably don't consider their power cost in the cost of mining.

So, is it really worth it?

[ShadowAlexey]

Main advantage of FPGA is scalability. It will be interesting to get their tech. spec. of alpha samples.

[temor]

A serious question would be- are FPGA's really necessary? What problems do they solve that GPU's don't already solve? FPGA's had an advantage in bitcoin only where cost per m/h was concerned, in total hashes- GPU cards still had more. I think there are probably few Litecoin farms (although this could change) and most LTC miners probably don't consider their power cost in the cost of mining.

So, is it really worth it?

I'd say that the logistics benefits alone make it worth it. It's very easy to run 20 FPGA's in an average home. It's not as easy running 20 GPU rigs inside a home, at least not inside mine.
I will buy Litecoin FPGA's as long as the price is reasonable.

[crazy_rabbit]

A serious question would be- are FPGA's really necessary? What problems do they solve that GPU's don't already solve? FPGA's had an advantage in bitcoin only where cost per m/h was concerned, in total hashes- GPU cards still had more. I think there are probably few Litecoin farms (although this could change) and most LTC miners probably don't consider their power cost in the cost of mining.

So, is it really worth it?

I'd say that the logistics benefits alone make it worth it. It's very easy to run 20 FPGA's in an average home. It's not as easy running 20 GPU rigs inside a home, at least not inside mine.
I will buy Litecoin FPGA's as long as the price is reasonable.

Good point. A lot less heat too.

[temor]

Good point. A lot less heat too.

Indeed. Dissipating the heat from 3 GPU rigs is hard enough for me, especially now that it's getting hotter outside. Opening a window merely makes things worse.

[crazy_rabbit]

Hello, my developing crypto-currency business, BlockBurner (mostly a blog atm, but more to come), is researching feasibility in the generation of a real FPGA Scrypt Litecoin mining appliance, specialized for the task much like the SHA256 FPGA's and ASIC's Bitcoin is about to begin running on.

To do this, there are a few things I need to know from the crypto-currency community, please answer each question if you respond to this post-

1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?

2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
.
.

BlockBurner.net

1. It is ready. We' ve been talking and waiting for this a long time ago.
2. I would definately buy one if it's really worth it. It should be cheaper than GPUs, quickier and you should consider the difficulty rise.
3. I would, but only if you guarantee me about the hashes that it would produce.

TIA

2. I would definately buy one if it's really worth it. It should be cheaper than GPUs, quickier and you should consider the difficulty rise.

We will see- but I doubt it with be neither cheaper nor quicker. FPGA's were not cheaper then GFX card or Faster. Only use electricity, smaller and less heat.

[Operatr]

A serious question would be- are FPGA's really necessary? What problems do they solve that GPU's don't already solve? FPGA's had an advantage in bitcoin only where cost per m/h was concerned, in total hashes- GPU cards still had more. I think there are probably few Litecoin farms (although this could change) and most LTC miners probably don't consider their power cost in the cost of mining.

So, is it really worth it?

I am looking at the linear path Bitcoin took. GPUs are power intensive and generate a lot of heat, at some point these two factors will outweigh any benefit to mining LTC as it scales up. GPUs represent lowest hardware cost/highest operating cost generally, where FPGA generally costs a little more up front, but you save in the longer run with less energy needed to power it and superior heat efficiency negating the need for A/C units or other cooling, increasing your keep long term.

Current FPGAs used for Litecoin are geared toward Bitcoin more, I am looking at one that is optimized for Scrypt for superior hashpower.

[evilscoop]

If I was being picky, id say best thing for an fpga board, is being modular...

If you can design the backplane to be expandable, and sell fpga expansion boards as it were (thinking modminerquad style) then new miners could get in with a little investment and toy with fpga too

[phk]

The problem is that the on-device block RAM is insanely slow compared to GPU ram (about 10 times slower for most FPGAs).  The per slice block RAM for most FPGAs is also less than 128 KB (more like 8 KB in typical cases).

Well, I'm not as familiar with GPU, but I doubt it is 10 times faster.  And I believe you have been misinformed regarding the capacity as well.

The Spartan-6 LX 150 used on many of the boards already built has 4.9 million bits of memory.  The memory in -3 speed grade part can run at up to 320MHz
Newer but similar priced Artix-7 have 13.4 million bits, with up to 509MHz in -3 grade parts.

As it relates to scrypt and it's 128KB scratchpad, the core loop accesses memory sequentially in 1024-bit widths.  Within an FPGA, you can have access to all 1024 bits in a single clock.  While you may not be able to achieve that performance point due to other issues,  1024 bits @ 320/500MHz is nothing to sneeze at.

[drawingthesun]

I thought a FPGA was reprogrammable? Why can't someone just buy a blank FPGA with a decent amount of onboard memory and program the chip? Am I misunderstanding how to set up a FPGA?

[Zalfrin]

I'd be interested in helping out on the development side of things, shoot me a PM if you would like to discuss more. I work on FPGAs for a living, so I have the proper skillset.