[ANN] Bitfury is looking for alpha-testers of first chips! FREE MONEY HERE!

[goodney]

I can send you my design files and BOM if you'd like. I haven't built the board yet as it's not back from the fab, but if you want to get some made yourself, let me know.

Would you consider, once you verify your board is working, to organize kits for interested buyers? If you order PCBs in some quantity you can get a discount not available if everyone orders PCB for himself. You can call a vote to see how many are interested, collect the money and order collective buy of components (everything except BF chips), with appropriate fee for you efforts.

Quite possibly. I'll keep everyone updated once the boards are built (and a BF ASIC is obtained... hint, hint...)

I'm also thinking about designing a board with room for 12-16 ASICs that will fit in the format of a miniITX board. This would let you use a 1U case and power supply. I'll post progress on that as it comes together.

[itod]

I can send you my design files and BOM if you'd like. I haven't built the board yet as it's not back from the fab, but if you want to get some made yourself, let me know.

Would you consider, once you verify your board is working, to organize kits for interested buyers? If you order PCBs in some quantity you can get a discount not available if everyone orders PCB for himself. You can call a vote to see how many are interested, collect the money and order collective buy of components (everything except BF chips), with appropriate fee for you efforts.

Quite possibly. I'll keep everyone updated once the boards are built (and a BF ASIC is obtained... hint, hint...)

I'm also thinking about designing a board with room for 12-16 ASICs that will fit in the format of a miniITX board. This would let you use a 1U case and power supply. I'll post progress on that as it comes together.

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

[KNK]

I'm also thinking about designing a board with room for 12-16 ASICs that will fit in the format of a miniITX board. This would let you use a 1U case and power supply. I'll post progress on that as it comes together.

It seems we are thinking about the same ( 1U case ) except that i am after full or mini ATX with more chips

[goodney]

I'm also thinking about designing a board with room for 12-16 ASICs that will fit in the format of a miniITX board. This would let you use a 1U case and power supply. I'll post progress on that as it comes together.

It seems we are thinking about the same ( 1U case ) except that i am after full or mini ATX with more chips

I was thinking the same thing, but miniITX cases seem to be more plentiful and much cheaper.

[goodney]

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

Will do! Hardware hacking is sort of both a hobby and profession for me. In fact, I literally just noticed that two MSP430 FRAM dev kits showed up on my desk this morning ;-)

[vs3]

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

Will do! Hardware hacking is sort of both a hobby and profession for me. In fact, I literally just noticed that two MSP430 FRAM dev kits showed up on my desk this morning ;-)

by the way - there are 1-chip projects out there - e.g. mine / NanoFury
(and the plan is to have that as an open source too)

[erk]

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

Will do! Hardware hacking is sort of both a hobby and profession for me. In fact, I literally just noticed that two MSP430 FRAM dev kits showed up on my desk this morning ;-)

by the way - there are 1-chip projects out there - e.g. mine / NanoFury
(and the plan is to have that as an open source too)

The one chip projects seem to be a bit over priced. Look for a multi-chip board if you can. Though some of those are expensive too.  The sweet spot is anything below $25 per GH/s.

[vs3]

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

Will do! Hardware hacking is sort of both a hobby and profession for me. In fact, I literally just noticed that two MSP430 FRAM dev kits showed up on my desk this morning ;-)

by the way - there are 1-chip projects out there - e.g. mine / NanoFury
(and the plan is to have that as an open source too)

The one chip projects seem to be a bit over priced. Look for a multi-chip board if you can. Though some of those are expensive too.  The sweet spot is anything below $25 per GH/s.

I think our NanoFury project will be somewhere around that $25/GH mark (or probably just a bit above it). On the plus side though, you don't have to worry about buying a separate power supply, RPi, cables, etc. - it's literally just "plug and play"

[itod]

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

Will do! Hardware hacking is sort of both a hobby and profession for me. In fact, I literally just noticed that two MSP430 FRAM dev kits showed up on my desk this morning ;-)

by the way - there are 1-chip projects out there - e.g. mine / NanoFury
(and the plan is to have that as an open source too)

If it will ever become opensource is not an issue, problem is it is not opensource now. If there is no other opensource competition it may never become one. At current difficulty increases and NanoFury prices (0.9BTC minimal with shipping, depending on destination) it already is not profitable and currently shipping miners never will be, see:
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/aa12fe32dd
That's why goodney's work is so important, he may single handily make those USB Bitfury miners profitable if he succeeds and offer kits which will reduce the price inside the ROI margins.

[vs3]

Great news! Just make working 1-chip miner with or without the chip a priority please, everything else will be easier and you will be out of the awful pre-order loop. People will get hold of the chips one way or the other, there are *no* kits on the market right now, especially open source ones. It will be a hit.

Will do! Hardware hacking is sort of both a hobby and profession for me. In fact, I literally just noticed that two MSP430 FRAM dev kits showed up on my desk this morning ;-)

by the way - there are 1-chip projects out there - e.g. mine / NanoFury
(and the plan is to have that as an open source too)

If it will ever become opensource is not an issue, problem is it is not opensource now. If there is no other opensource competition it may never become one. At current difficulty increases and NanoFury prices (0.9BTC minimal with shipping, depending on destination) it already is not profitable and currently shipping miners never will be, see:
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/aa12fe32dd
That's why goodney's work is so important, he may single handily make those USB Bitfury miners profitable if he succeeds and offer kits which will reduce the price inside the ROI margins.

A few clarifications:
- price as we stand now will be less than 0.55BTC + $0-$4/device shipping. (and not 0.9)
- open source: we're already providing access to the files for those that are interested. I even sent a bunch of the sample boards to several people wanting to experiment. PM me if you're interested.

[gingernuts]

Just a quick question - if I connect IOREF to VDD rather than building a voltage divider for 1/2 IOVDD, what happens as I raise VDD from the nominal 0.8v towards 1.0v? Does the I/O get flaky, and if so, does anyone know at what point?

Cheers.

[vs3]

Just a quick question - if I connect IOREF to VDD rather than building a voltage divider for 1/2 IOVDD, what happens as I raise VDD from the nominal 0.8v towards 1.0v? Does the I/O get flaky, and if so, does anyone know at what point?

Cheers.

Part of your answer is in this reply from bitfury:

Pad diagram: https://mega.co.nz/#!SctDlaJY!TMVG_E6gOVI-MMky8BS0hTy_h-AqpBeVfgrKF_d0J7g

central pad - ground
35 pads - VDD - on three sides - core voltage - 0.6 .. 0.9 V with high amperage.

I/O (required for testing):

IOVDD - feed it with 1.8 V
IOREF - feed it with 0.9 V for standard signalling (better not take VDD but put resistive divider between GND and IOVDD) and some cap to remove pulsations.
INCLK - input clock (in case if internal oscillator not works)

and part is in that pad diagram file referred there - where it says about IOREF:

LOGIC 0 INPUT      INPUT > IOREF + 50 mV (+- 50%)                
LOGIC 1 INPUT      INPUT < IOREF + 50 mV (+- 50%)               

LOGIC 0 OUTPUT      GND               
LOGIC 1 OUTPUT      IOVDD               

(and I think the 0 and 1 levels are vice versa - IN<IOREF ="0" and IN>IOREF="1")

So, when you increase IOVDD that threshold may get off a bit, but most likely everything will still work just fine.

[gingernuts]

Cheers for the quick reply - yeah, I hope those input voltage levels are the wrong way round too 

I guess I should have plenty of margin, doubt I'd try more than 1.0v VDD.

[intron]

The bi•fury heatsinks got a nice color now and you
might bump into some at The European Bitcoin
Convention in Amsterdam:)





intron

[kano]

So ... I've been wondering why the chip has printed on it 5GHash
I had my suspicions ... then I've had two people mention some things about the way they work ...
(I don't have any of these chips ... so I can't verify it)

But ... is the reason: a portion of the chip doesn't work properly?
i.e. the chip has some design flaw in it that means it only gets ... a bit over half of that 5GHash?
... so that Gen 2 chips would just be the fully working version of the Gen 1 chip?
Anyone got any info on that?

If you have a lot of these chips hashing away, then an analysis of the range of the share nonce values would be pretty clear about this.
(though you may have to account for endian-ness also)

Though, I will also add another question: Who's idea on the single USB 'thing' was it, to have it NOT return results, until it completes the nonce range?
Does nobody learn for the mistakes of others or have any experience in doing this stuff?
Sigh.

I've given this info to quite a few hardware designers that I've spoken to in the past - but it seems the BitFury team wasn't interested in this free info so they did it ... wrong
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294499.0

[KNK]

But ... is the reason: a portion of the chip doesn't work properly?

All cores work fine, but ...

i.e. the chip has some design flaw in it that means it only gets ... a bit over half of that 5GHash?

correct, the fast clock is not working and it is difficult to get it running stable at higher clocks, but by design it should be able to reach 500MHz which is 5.88GH and it could be 5GH at 450MHz

... so that Gen 2 chips would just be the fully working version of the Gen 1 chip?

bitfury said (if he didn't change his mind yet), that there will be no second mask for the current design i.e. Gen 2 will be a different chip

[cscape]

But ... is the reason: a portion of the chip doesn't work properly?
i.e. the chip has some design flaw in it that means it only gets ... a bit over half of that 5GHash?
... so that Gen 2 chips would just be the fully working version of the Gen 1 chip?
Anyone got any info on that?

Each chip has 756 hashing cores. I've done some tests, and seen that in most chips, nearly all of them return results. The fact that they don't get 5GH/sec is probably due to max clock being lower than expected.

Though, I will also add another question: Who's idea on the single USB 'thing' was it, to have it NOT return results, until it completes the nonce range?
Does nobody learn for the mistakes of others or have any experience in doing this stuff?

It's a little bit more work to return nonces as soon as they are found. The chainminer software does it, though.

[-ck]

The sample software runs through and tests a number of nonce offsets  for each return values (6). In my testing of the BF1 USB stick, only 3 of those offsets ever succeed to return values. So either the nonce offsets/nonce calculation used in the sample software are wrong, or half the cores don't work.

[cscape]

Note that only 756/1024 of the total nonce space is checked, the remaining part is just not implemented on the chip. Also, some chips perform worse than others. They could have some manufacturing defect, affecting part of the cores. Raising the frequency too far also increases the error rate. Unstable power regulator could have the same effect... and then there's always communication and software errors.

[KNK]

The sample software runs through and tests a number of nonce offsets  for each return values (6). In my testing of the BF1 USB stick, only 3 of those offsets ever succeed to return values. So either the nonce offsets/nonce calculation used in the sample software are wrong, or half the cores don't work.

Would you please tell me which ones are those 3 ... i am just about to add some debugging code in that part and would like to put them first in the list