LIGHTNINGASIC launching GPU miner. 8X GPU, 16XGPU, UP TO 32XGPU.

[kurbeks]

Really intrested in this. So will be waiting for more info and pictures. Also 16x and 32x rigs

[marcos5872]

Are pieces on stock? Some review?

[asiabtc]

Are pieces on stock? Some review?

market is too hot.
no stock.

[Yatsida]

Are pieces on stock? Some review?

market is too hot.
no stock.

Do you have 16 GPU for sale?

[StanchoBS]

Can you put 8 GPUs in this board or you will need usb riser ? I cant see space with PCIE slots for 8 GPUs

[xxx2003gs]

Hello, I see your results.

1. The card is a PCIE switch using the PEX8614 chip, which costs about $ 40.
2. And can only work in PCIE 2.0 4X to 8 PCIE 2.0 1X modes. Because the PEX8614 can only support up to 12 PCIE LANEs and 12 PCIE Ports (1 INPUT and 8 OUTPUT). And your design forgets to use GPIO to configure troubleshooting. So you can not work in PCIE 16X mode.
3. More than six new GPUs in a system (old GPU, such as 7870 it can work 12 because it only needs half the resources), you need to configure the BIOS MMIO, usually its BIOS option is Above 4G Decoding The
4. Most motherboards can support more than eight GPUs, but you need non-standard BIOS. Such as Panda's custom motherboards using the X79 BIOS, add Haswell CPU microcode support to get the Above 4G Decoding option.
5. The AMD driver does not support more than eight GPUs in an OS. If you want to make a 16 / 32GPU system. You must use Intel VT-D and SR-IOV technology, and through virtualization to achieve. Or you customize an AMD driver (but it is very difficult).
6. So on the lightning miners can make more than 8GPU system, I think this is not possible, because you do not understand how to achieve. You just made a PCIE switch card, it's very simple.

Sorry for my english. Hope you can understand.

Interesting.

Well, for a start, both AMD and NVIDIA don't support 32 GPUs with their drivers. You'd need a custom driver - and I doubt you're going to give that technology to the masses, for free. What kind of mode are you running in? You'd need to use virtualization technology for anything above 8 GPU for AMD, 16 for NVIDIA - I might be wrong on the NVIDIA though ( they may only support 8 ).

kilo17, I would expect you to have known this.

EDIT: Changed about to above.

I appreciate the confidence you have in my knowledge (makes me feel good).  I must disagree with you on this one, although I could be wrong.  The real limits are the mobo BIOS and not the drivers per se.  jstefanop is probably better to answer this question than I am since he has been in direct contact with Greg Stoner from AMD but here is a quote from Greg

"It does not matter if you have the all the cards on single CPU with 16 GPU’s ( You will need multilevel PLX switches)  or two CPU with 8 GPU’s.   On 2P system the critical issue is the system bios need have enough PCIe resources for Doorbell BAR, IO BAR, MMIO BAR and Expansion ROM.    One thing beyond 16 GPU’s you heading into new world for both AMD and NVIDIA."

I have posted a link to this thread from jstefanop and Greg Stoner previously and if anyone is interested I will post it again, it is about running greater than 8 gpu's per rig.  It is a great read.

Since I am not familiar with the custom motherboards that Panda or Lightening are using and I have not peaked at the BIOS from them either I cannot say how it is set up.

On a side note, I have been in discussions to have a 12 and/or 16 GPU mobo manufactured and there has not been any issues per the engineers at the manufacturer as long as the mobo doesn't have unnecessary crap on it.

cheers 

[Eyedol-X]

Hello, I see your results.

1. The card is a PCIE switch using the PEX8614 chip, which costs about $ 40.
2. And can only work in PCIE 2.0 4X to 8 PCIE 2.0 1X modes. Because the PEX8614 can only support up to 12 PCIE LANEs and 12 PCIE Ports (1 INPUT and 8 OUTPUT). And your design forgets to use GPIO to configure troubleshooting. So you can not work in PCIE 16X mode.
3. More than six new GPUs in a system (old GPU, such as 7870 it can work 12 because it only needs half the resources), you need to configure the BIOS MMIO, usually its BIOS option is Above 4G Decoding The
4. Most motherboards can support more than eight GPUs, but you need non-standard BIOS. Such as Panda's custom motherboards using the X79 BIOS, add Haswell CPU microcode support to get the Above 4G Decoding option.
5. The AMD driver does not support more than eight GPUs in an OS. If you want to make a 16 / 32GPU system. You must use Intel VT-D and SR-IOV technology, and through virtualization to achieve. Or you customize an AMD driver (but it is very difficult).
6. So on the lightning miners can make more than 8GPU system, I think this is not possible, because you do not understand how to achieve. You just made a PCIE switch card, it's very simple.

Sorry for my english. Hope you can understand.

This is some interesting information.

If they stick to an 8GPU system and provide a barebones kit, I think they will get a lot of interest.

[philipma1957]

Hello, I see your results.

1. The card is a PCIE switch using the PEX8614 chip, which costs about $ 40.
2. And can only work in PCIE 2.0 4X to 8 PCIE 2.0 1X modes. Because the PEX8614 can only support up to 12 PCIE LANEs and 12 PCIE Ports (1 INPUT and 8 OUTPUT). And your design forgets to use GPIO to configure troubleshooting. So you can not work in PCIE 16X mode.
3. More than six new GPUs in a system (old GPU, such as 7870 it can work 12 because it only needs half the resources), you need to configure the BIOS MMIO, usually its BIOS option is Above 4G Decoding The
4. Most motherboards can support more than eight GPUs, but you need non-standard BIOS. Such as Panda's custom motherboards using the X79 BIOS, add Haswell CPU microcode support to get the Above 4G Decoding option.
5. The AMD driver does not support more than eight GPUs in an OS. If you want to make a 16 / 32GPU system. You must use Intel VT-D and SR-IOV technology, and through virtualization to achieve. Or you customize an AMD driver (but it is very difficult).
6. So on the lightning miners can make more than 8GPU system, I think this is not possible, because you do not understand how to achieve. You just made a PCIE switch card, it's very simple.

Sorry for my english. Hope you can understand.

This is some interesting information.

If they stick to an 8GPU system and provide a barebones kit, I think they will get a lot of interest.

I have a gpu in mind to use on the eight slot board. it is a thin 1070 from nvidia 1 slot wide.

[xxx2003gs]

If you can work for 8 GPUs, please check your BIOS, it must have Above 4G decoding option.

Hello, I see your results.

1. The card is a PCIE switch using the PEX8614 chip, which costs about $ 40.
2. And can only work in PCIE 2.0 4X to 8 PCIE 2.0 1X modes. Because the PEX8614 can only support up to 12 PCIE LANEs and 12 PCIE Ports (1 INPUT and 8 OUTPUT). And your design forgets to use GPIO to configure troubleshooting. So you can not work in PCIE 16X mode.
3. More than six new GPUs in a system (old GPU, such as 7870 it can work 12 because it only needs half the resources), you need to configure the BIOS MMIO, usually its BIOS option is Above 4G Decoding The
4. Most motherboards can support more than eight GPUs, but you need non-standard BIOS. Such as Panda's custom motherboards using the X79 BIOS, add Haswell CPU microcode support to get the Above 4G Decoding option.
5. The AMD driver does not support more than eight GPUs in an OS. If you want to make a 16 / 32GPU system. You must use Intel VT-D and SR-IOV technology, and through virtualization to achieve. Or you customize an AMD driver (but it is very difficult).
6. So on the lightning miners can make more than 8GPU system, I think this is not possible, because you do not understand how to achieve. You just made a PCIE switch card, it's very simple.

Sorry for my english. Hope you can understand.

This is some interesting information.

If they stick to an 8GPU system and provide a barebones kit, I think they will get a lot of interest.

I have a gpu in mind to use on the eight slot board. it is a thin 1070 from nvidia 1 slot wide.

[totalacedude]

Anyone used or ordered one of these?

[asiabtc]

Hello, I see your results.

1. The card is a PCIE switch using the PEX8614 chip, which costs about $ 40.
2. And can only work in PCIE 2.0 4X to 8 PCIE 2.0 1X modes. Because the PEX8614 can only support up to 12 PCIE LANEs and 12 PCIE Ports (1 INPUT and 8 OUTPUT). And your design forgets to use GPIO to configure troubleshooting. So you can not work in PCIE 16X mode.
3. More than six new GPUs in a system (old GPU, such as 7870 it can work 12 because it only needs half the resources), you need to configure the BIOS MMIO, usually its BIOS option is Above 4G Decoding The
4. Most motherboards can support more than eight GPUs, but you need non-standard BIOS. Such as Panda's custom motherboards using the X79 BIOS, add Haswell CPU microcode support to get the Above 4G Decoding option.
5. The AMD driver does not support more than eight GPUs in an OS. If you want to make a 16 / 32GPU system. You must use Intel VT-D and SR-IOV technology, and through virtualization to achieve. Or you customize an AMD driver (but it is very difficult).
6. So on the lightning miners can make more than 8GPU system, I think this is not possible, because you do not understand how to achieve. You just made a PCIE switch card, it's very simple.

Sorry for my english. Hope you can understand.

This is some interesting information.

If they stick to an 8GPU system and provide a barebones kit, I think they will get a lot of interest.

i believe in this.

[KaydenC]

Interested if the price is right.

[Vaccinus]

Can you put 8 GPUs in this board or you will need usb riser ? I cant see space with PCIE slots for 8 GPUs

this is not the board where you put the gpu this is just a expansion slot card that you connect your gpu to, this board will be put in the motherboard, but you need a otherboard that support 8 gpu or more, or this is useless

[asiabtc]

Can you put 8 GPUs in this board or you will need usb riser ? I cant see space with PCIE slots for 8 GPUs

this is not the board where you put the gpu this is just a expansion slot card that you connect your gpu to, this board will be put in the motherboard, but you need a otherboard that support 8 gpu or more, or this is useless

you didn't catch the key. and totally wrong.

[cptfisher]

actually amd roc and fire pro support more than 8 gpus in nix system headless

[un4given]

i think most of us would be pretty happy to get the board only for 8 GPU. one can build wonderful rigs with such kind of a platform.
but to be honest, the website is a piece of junk. we need some1 to test this board and seller and confirm if they r eligliable.
i hope @philipma1957  will get his hands on this and test it. Wonder what the price will be for this board? guys, how much r u ready to pay for this?

[Wotan Wipeout]

I dont believe this.
I will stay at 6x or 7x 1070 at 1 Motherboard.

[bentcrypto]

I'm interested in multiple MOBO's.

When is the ETA?

[philipma1957]

i think most of us would be pretty happy to get the board only for 8 GPU. one can build wonderful rigs with such kind of a platform.
but to be honest, the website is a piece of junk. we need some1 to test this board and seller and confirm if they r eligliable.
i hope @philipma1957  will get his hands on this and test it. Wonder what the price will be for this board? guys, how much r u ready to pay for this?

I have been told by the op I would need to wait  more then a month  and less then  six months to get them.

I am 95% sure the eight slot mobo's will work fine.

I personally have 0 interest in the  16 or 24 or 32 card options.

But I would love to have the 8 slot mobo's.

My solar array will be reworked for the summertime and I could use the 8 slot mobos yesterday not 1 to 6 months from now.

I have no need for anything but the mobo's

As I could do 8 card  nvidia 1070 builds easy

or do 4 card nvidia 1080 ti builds easy with an eight slot board.

So do not look for these  as barebones any time soon.

[djeZo]

I can share you some of my observations, because I am working on a project to get 8+ GPUs into same machine.

Now, I have been confirmed by NVIDIA tech people, that this is possible and it is not limited by drivers or OS: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1004967/cuda-programming-and-performance/max-number-of-cuda-devices/

I have also contacted several manufacturers that are creating pcie expansion backplanes, such as:
- http://amfeltec.com/
- http://www.onestopsystems.com/
- http://cyclone.com/index.php

Out of curiosity, I also ordered that cheap 30 USD 1x to 3x PCIe expansion that is being sold everywhere around. Tested on several various motherboards from low end to high end, it does NOT work!

Then I ordered backplane from amfeltec which has a PLX chip on. It works, no issues at all. But of course, these toys are not for mining. A very simple backplane that has only 4 slots (1x to 4x) costs around 500 USD. And here comes the trick; all ports on backplane works fine, you can put 4 cards on it and it will work, but the total number of GPUs in system matter. And the motherboard I used for testing this backplane supports only 6 GPUs. No matter where I insert 7th card, the system would not boot. This indicate that the real issue is in BIOS and it is not a hardware problem.

An interesting expansion backplane is this: http://www.acalbfi.com/nl/Embedded-computing/PCI-PCIe/Bus-Expansion/p/PCIe-x16-Gen-2-Expansion/00000008SX It is the size of ATX motherboard. But keep in mind that this toy costs ~1500 USD.

I also sent query to the companies listed above asking about motherboard compatibility. I was specifically asking whether an Asus X99-E-10G WS (a 500 USD worth motherboard) would work. Their response was:

... I would recommend higher-end desktop motherboards or server-class machines.  Low end desktops tend to have BIOS packages that take shortcuts.  Your Asus mobo may be perfectly fine.  We have successfully used Intel, SuperMicro, Asus, Dell, HP, and Gigabyte with our 16 slot backplane. ...

Bottom line is this; forget about these cheap expansions methods. Even if they work, your motherboard probably will not support it. Cheap motherboards tend to take shortcuts, which would explain everything. If you really want a solution, you will first need pro expensive motherboard. After that, you will need even more expensive expansion backplane. The only pcie switching chips that actually work are PLX and these chips are EXPENSIVE. Ever wondered why motherboards that support 4way CF/SLI are so expensive? Because they pack one or two PLX chips that cost 100 USD a piece. And forget about cheap chinese shit (just look at that 1x to 3x PCIe expansion board, it has some cheap chinese chip on top of it, no wonder it doesn't work). It is also highly unlikely that some chinese company would come out with their own designed motherboard; we all know that all they do is just copy and copy from west world and are incapable of designing stuff on their own.