Musing on a new ASIC for Bitcoin Mining

[rtt6942]

I've been looking at the Bitcoin community for about two weeks now.  This started as my company has received numerous requests for an FPGA or ASIC solution for bitcoin mining.

   My company is a small design house that primarily designs ASICs, but also some FPGA and PCB level products.  We have even done a fair amount of small quantity production.  All of our engineers have 20 to 30 years of experience in design and development and we have collectively, successfully completed over 40 ASICs and many FPGAs and system level products.  Personally, I am a former VP of engineering for a supercomputer company and an accomplished processor architect.

   So just for kicks and chuckles I coded up my own SHA256 engine and built a bitcoin miner.  My first effort was to push the design through the Xilinx design tools and see where we stand.  I decided to only use the main fabric of the FPGA (no DSP or Block RAM) so that the design will easily translate into an ASIC later.  Here are my results:

   Xilinx Kintex 7   XC7K160-1   400 MH/s  at 10.12 Watts
   Xilinx Kintex 7   XC7K160-3   500 MH/s  at   9.81 Watts

   Those power numbers suggest that I could push the -3 version faster.

   Interesting but it seems that the community needs ASICs.  So we are doing a trial place and route of this verilog design in our ASIC tools to see where we are with an ASIC.

[1714753963]

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[1714753963]

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[hashfiend]

I think I speak for many when I say it'd be great to see another ASIC company in the market, especially one that is actually able to ship products.

If you decide to produce this I would certainly like to hear more -- and probably buy a few miners, depending on price of course.

[rtt6942]

Shipping product is only really a function of planning and experience.

Too soon to talk of price but this looks like a fairly small chip, to us at least.  So the manufacturing cost should be very low.

[Surprise]

If you can actually produce and ship an ASIC you'll have a goldmine, but considering how many people promise ASICs and how few deliver don't expect anyone to trust you until you've put working machines in the hands of trusted people in the community.

[Endlessa]

If you do the following:

1) Make a product
2) Sell it for a price that will allow people to profit after 30 days (don't do what Avalon and AsicMiner did, which is capitalize of the fear of not owning one)
3) deliver it too some bloggers
4) open you manufacturing facility to be viewable (photos, webcams, etc)
5) have a supply line that can ship a product to a user in < 30 days
6) be ready for a flood orders

then you sir will have a crazy cash machine on your hands. . ..in the end with bitmining, it's the hardware makers that will make "bank"

[BigZee]

If you can prove you have a working product, send it to some bloggers to get some more PR, allow miners that live close to you to come see the ASICs in person, provide REALISTIC shipping estimates, and competitive prices, you could make a ton of money. The smaller your shipping time, the more money you'll make.

[abigfish]

If you do the following:

1) Make a product
2) Sell it for a price that will allow people to profit after 30 days (don't do what Avalon and AsicMiner did, which is capitalize of the fear of not owning one)
3) deliver it too some bloggers
4) open you manufacturing facility to be viewable (photos, webcams, etc)
5) have a supply line that can ship a product to a user in < 30 days
6) be ready for a flood orders

then you sir will have a crazy cash machine on your hands. . ..in the end with bitmining, it's the hardware makers that will make "bank"

+1


Would also love to hear more

[loudog40]

Very cool!  Sounds like you guys have a lot of expertise in the area which could make you competitive quickly.  Not knowing much about hardware architecture I wonder how this would be scaled to higher speeds.  You mention you mostly do small quantity production so you'd probably be thinking of making more powerful more expensive rigs, as opposed to cheaper high volume ~500MH/s USB sticks?  Also, are you guys in a position to make the whole product or do you just do integrated circuits?

[jgivg]

Sounds great. In case you ever create them, will this post count as a preorder and put me in a good spot to make an early order? 

[rtt6942]

It seems that this whole community has been bitten by poor performance from so called ASIC suppliers.  I does make me pause to consider if I want to get into this but the potential is intriguing.  We certainly know how to build ASICs and assemble them onto boards and manufacture them.  We are also hooked up with a number of Contract Manufacturers (CMs) who could manufacture in volume and then build and ship to order.

So I'm going to look into this further and see what happens! 

Our trial place and route is nearly done so will post the results shortly!

[rtt6942]

Well trial place and route looks good!!

Timing comes in around 711ps so I'll fudge that to 800ps.  So we should get a clock rate of 1.25 GHz.  So our core will run at 1.25 GH/s.

So now we will investigate power and area to find the optimal number of cores we can package in a single die (chip)!

I'd like it to be 8 so we have a 10 GH/s chip!  100 chips 1 TH/s

[sgh858]

It's great new if it's actually true, consider people waiting from BFL for almost one year already with nothing other than "testing", "shipping in two weeks".

I would like to be in your pre-order list too. Please add me.

[sgh858]

BTW, please forget about the power consumption optimization. We need the product first, be it 100w or 500w or whatever. You just need to make the first generation of ASIC miner, sell, ship to us.

Power optimization can be done later in the 2nd gen.

In bitcoin mining, time is truly the money.

[Astrophysical]

add me to the pre-order list as well 

power optimization is truly a secondary concern to most

[bitcoinminerz]

This is really interesting, I'll certainly be keeping an eye on this.

[paulin]

I am also looking for ASIC miner

[nmderr]

I am also looking for ASIC miner

[Kiders]

sign me up for one asap

[evilscoop]

if you are working on this, can I suggest you also investigate making scrypt asics and or fpga's too...

you really will get a flood of orders then

[rtt6942]

Well I'm encouraged by the interest even if this still in the Newbie area!

The power optimization step is so we can judge how many cores to put on a single chip.  You wouldn't want the thing melting after all!  This design is mostly flip-flops which use most of the power in a chip so we need to careful here to get it right!

As far as pre-orders go I think we are too early, but assuming this thread persists then I guess an order is established as long as they pay up when required.  At least it can be an order for rights of refusal.

[iPaulito]

Ok, count me in pre-order list if you make it.

[glowkeeper]

I've been looking at the Bitcoin community for about two weeks now.  This started as my company has received numerous requests for an FPGA or ASIC solution for bitcoin mining.

   My company is a small design house that primarily designs ASICs, but also some FPGA and PCB level products.  We have even done a fair amount of small quantity production.  All of our engineers have 20 to 30 years of experience in design and development and we have collectively, successfully completed over 40 ASICs and many FPGAs and system level products.  Personally, I am a former VP of engineering for a supercomputer company and an accomplished processor architect.

   So just for kicks and chuckles I coded up my own SHA256 engine and built a bitcoin miner.  My first effort was to push the design through the Xilinx design tools and see where we stand.  I decided to only use the main fabric of the FPGA (no DSP or Block RAM) so that the design will easily translate into an ASIC later.  Here are my results:

   Xilinx Kintex 7   XC7K160-1   400 MH/s  at 10.12 Watts
   Xilinx Kintex 7   XC7K160-3   500 MH/s  at   9.81 Watts

   Those power numbers suggest that I could push the -3 version faster.

   Interesting but it seems that the community needs ASICs.  So we are doing a trial place and route of this verilog design in our ASIC tools to see where we are with an ASIC.

+1

(5/5  )

[zss9174]

Please let me know how everything goes, I'm certainly interested, and would love to look into buying one or more!

[Thujone]

Just imagine what we will be seeing in a few years....

[LTCesk]

Count me in aswell if this will actually count as preorder!

[rtt6942]

OK so while we wait for the physical design guys to get back to me with area and power I'm looking at how to hook up so many cores in parallel. 

I have a question or two:

Is there a preferred method of splitting the workload ?

Can I partition the nonce and have each core work and a subset?

Should all cores work on the same job at once?

How do Avalon, BFL and multiple GPUs etc. do it now?

[rtt6942]

OOPS that second question should be:

Can I partition the nonce and have each core work on a subset?

[rtt6942]

Lost that question mark.  Sorry, guess I really am still a Newbie!!

[Biowhaler]

If you do the following:

1) Make a product
2) Sell it for a price that will allow people to profit after 30 days (don't do what Avalon and AsicMiner did, which is capitalize of the fear of not owning one)
3) deliver it too some bloggers
4) open you manufacturing facility to be viewable (photos, webcams, etc)
5) have a supply line that can ship a product to a user in < 30 days
6) be ready for a flood orders

then you sir will have a crazy cash machine on your hands. . ..in the end with bitmining, it's the hardware makers that will make "bank"

One question that has never been answered to my satisfaction: if you can manufacture these things to meet the above criteria why would you sell them? Why not mine with them yourself if they are that profitable?

[rtt6942]

Simple.  I have a minimum buy of 25 wafers.  That amounts to something like 100,000 chips.  Sure I could build a system with a thousand chips but I'm not likely to build 100 for myself.  Besides from what I read that many chips would need to be spread out across the network to keep the balance.  Wouldn't want to spoil the whole thing.

Can anyone answer my questions??

[mymenace]

Very interested. Orders not trustworthy anymore, thanks BFL. Supply and buy is the way to go.

[lytecoin]

Can anyone answer my questions??

Although I can't answer your questions, I am interested in the product.  If you have a preorder going, put me on the list.

[Anenome5]

Count me in for a pre-order, very interesting.

[greetuse]

open you manufacturing facility to be viewable

[gotosea]

If you can prove you have a working product, send it to some bloggers to get some more PR,

[Mastergerund]

It's about time we have a real company looking into bitcoin ASICs. Assuming this is genuine and finished products can be bought with escrow, I am interested.

[paulin]

I am also interestred if it can be delivered

[Surprise]

Count me in for pre ordering. Would you mind showing us your company site and provide details about it?

[evilscoop]

You may want to look at the following project :-
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49971.0

And poke around the bitstreams at :-
https://github.com/luke-jr/bfgminer
https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer

[twobits]

OOPS that second question should be:

Can I partition the nonce and have each core work on a subset?

Yeah, and also even to some extent you can vary nTime. 

There seems to be one of two routes people are going with this.  Either talk over USB to a host or have a complete standalone miner that hooks into your network with Ethernet.   If you plan to go the later I would be happy to help package up the embedded software for it.

At this stage of things,  you are going to want to use Stratum as the protocol to talk to pools.   

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17zHy1SUlhgtCMbypO8cHgpWH73V5iUQKk_0rWvMqSNs/edit?hl=en_US

I would look at https://github.com/m0mchil/poclbm as an example miner as it is not GPLed, unlike the two linked too above.  At least until you decide for sure if you want to deal with the GPL.

[miningusa]

Can never have enough ASIC's

[spazcoin]

The power optimization step is so we can judge how many cores to put on a single chip.  You wouldn't want the thing melting after all!  This design is mostly flip-flops which use most of the power in a chip so we need to careful here to get it right!

Agreed, a mining rig that overheats isn't a very useful mining rig.  Did you see the giant heatsink on the Butterfly Labs unit that Ars just unboxed?  It's GIANT!  http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/weve-got-a-butterfly-labs-bitcoin-miner-and-its-pretty-darn-fast/

[m00min]

Another ASIC on the market would be great, I will be very interested to hear your pricing!

Will wait patiently

[toolbag]

I think this is a fantastic idea!

[BitJohn]

I would take one today!

[kittycatman]

if you can beat the price of an old pc + ati card, you've got yourself a customer

[joelnet]

<-- interest level high