OK, I have waited with great patience till
http://bitbet.us/bet/450/bitfurys-asic-will-work-with-power-1/ went to pending resolution status. It gets more and more interesting.
Right now we had trouble with getting chips "in time" for tests (as we expected to get chips on 30th May and do the test earlier in June). So my friend went to Taiwan to get chips, meanwhile packaging factory tries to push delivery to 13th... We'll work hard to push it back to 10th or 11th as they promised second time. But it depends... More information will be available likely on monday.
So - to speedup testing and provide plausible and trustworthy confirmation of performance I have decided that we will send sample chips to 3-4 persons of this forums with following conditions:
- We will send 10-30 chips (number of chips is that what you could select yourself depending on your custom issues - say if you sure that no problem to get 30 sample chips - we'll send 30). Preliminary specs - each chip would give roughly 5 GH/s performance.
- You will solder AS SOON AS YOU GET chip it using dead-bug style (for later chip make PCBs of course, however if you are eager to run it quicker - dead-bug might be right way) with bypass capacitors underneath and will try to run it, measure power consumption and performance with different voltage modes (sweep from 0.5 V to 0.9 V).
- You will post photos in any case - not depending whether chip works or not, it could be also interesting if you could scrub the top and post photo of its internals (if you could remove AL_RDL layer that would be great).
- You have to understand C programming language and boards like raspberrypi (if not you should team up with programmer) - but that's mandatory, and understand how to deal with quick power-hungry chip (i.e. capacitor bypass selection, power impedance issues).
- It would be great, but not mandatory, if you have good web of trust to these persons who are running website bitbet.us:
http://serajewelks.bitcoin-otc.com/trustgraph.php?source=kakobrekla&dest=mircea_popescu as they do not trust our results much, and it would be nice to give them bulletproof confirmations _IN_TIME_ for bet resolution.
- Reporting during some time how chips behave - whether they all alive and hash good or broke with time passed, and guesses why they break (maybe by sending chip to us so we could unpackage them and scan them to find out failure reason).
Additional requirements:
- Being hacker at least a bit... As we haven't enough time to write documentation, and you'll basically get C-code for raspberry that is capable to communicate, not well-tested. Some half-working miner code. Chip pinout. Maybe verilog code... It's a bonus if you could do debug - in case if chip will not work and you'll find bug - we'll likely just pay additional bonus for that. Don't expect good written documentation of any kind and don't expect that I will be able to spend many hours explaining how to make this job. Likely we'll open separate discussion thread and will discuss issues there.
- You would likely need lab power supply, if you don't have - then prepare 0.6 - 0.9 V power supply with current up to 6 amps, power supply of 1.8 V with current 100-200 mA
- raspberry-pi board or board like that (first software will be designed for it), if other board used - you should know what you do and do it yourself - SPI required.
- maybe you should have to use EXTERNAL clock generator giving 150 - 500 Mhz programmable frequency output.
- it would be great to have at hand 500 - 1000 Mhz oscilloscope, even better to have 10 Ghz oscilloscope to make clock jitter measurements, also it would be even greater to have spectrum analyzer with 4-10 Ghz bandwidth to measure power noise spectral content and debug in case if you have excessive pulsations in power network at certain frequencies by reworking capacitor bypass network to get good performance (however all of that can be skipped if we are lucky enough and have good margins in chip).
- handle chip carefully - as ESD-protection may underperform and may not give 2kV HBM protection for example. This should be met, but we don't know if it is met or not yet.
If candidates will be 3-4 or less - they will get chips, if more - I will collect in PM or in this thread requests to take opportunity with testing, make after 24 hours additional POLL topic, and those who will be elected will get chips. 48 hours after this message I hope everything will be known and settled.
Chips will be sent on 10-11th from Taiwan, if we'll find out how to help our packaging factory to make it happen, but it can be later as well. Anyway it is not only bet issue, but we would like to know about chips performance AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. I think that opportunity to get these hashes earliest would be excellent motivation to execute tests in shortest possible terms.
PS. I've read that someone here is reselling metabank.ru offers with our chips. I would like to clarify - first - neither me nor metabank.ru endorses these resellers. Second - metabank.ru is not taking 'prepayment', its just preorders with 100% refund just to freeze funds - basically people can just show them bitcoins and keep on their OWN wallets (not moving them). Its mainly purpose is just preliminary evaluation of volumes for next production batch. With other sales, etc - that all will be discussed only AFTER testing. So my advice - don't be crazy and don't buy BS (Edited: this is what I meant - is those crazy sellers for $5k with prepayment and without guarantees, BitCentury seems to be legit and faithful).... But of course you may be lucky and that will happen as advertised - that's your win/loose.
PPS. About further distribution of chips - we have ideas (yet only ideas we'll see how that will happen in reality) - standard instrument "chip futures with real delivery with expiration date MM.YYYY", it would be traded online and actual delivery will be done by tytus (Leszek), and instead of direct contract there will be one single public contract. Then - for small to medium order amounts actual acquisition would be done to multiple locations using intermediaries who will do assembly, certification and will have end-user support for the devices. For bigger quantities it will be possible to get chips directly. I think some of delivery locations will convert "bulk" into smaller amounts for chip deliveries as well. But to grasp overall idea - we'll not multiply headache, but actually spread headache among many many heads, so each will have much less headache to pass and grow to higher volumes. Also there's some technical issues that we're discussing - how to organize it... I would like to deploy fully-featured peer-to-peer real-time exchange as open-source project and invite current web-sites to distribute tickers and handle cash-in/cash-out issues (that's not limited to these futures, but are open for many participating parties as well), but being objected that it's quite complex and not trivial to do in limited time. I hope that if we have enough of luck and chip will work, I'll have enough time to make this actually happen.
SO PLEASE, DON'T BOMBARD ME WITH REQUESTS TO BUY CHIPS, ETC. JUST BE PATIENT.
