Goliath Miner

[yohan]

A lot of you have been asking about our next generation of equipment and the purpose of this post is to introduce the way we are now going as a set of systems rather than just individual boards. We have been working on a number of technology options and have 2 of those options nearly ready to test and to offer short term for sale.

The system concept is for larger rigs typically using a 19" sub-rack to offer typically 300-500 GH/s depending on the board technology used and that is the unit size that we will initially be selling in. It isn't for small miners (sorry little guys) although we may offer something smaller later in the year for that market with a revision of Cairnsmore2 that we have been using for algorythm development. The GoliathMiner concept will over time offer a range of technologies some for Bitcoin and maybe some for Litecoin. The initial focus will be on Bitcoin.

The first technology offering isn't very original in that the base card is based on Avalon chips. The Cairnsmore3 has 144 of Avalon chips on-board. The main reason for offering this technology is purely customer demand and our ability to build units will depend on securing Avalon chips. So it will be for buyers that bring Avalon chips with them.



The second technology offering is Cairnsmore4 and this option offers more flexibility than Cairnsmore3. As well as Bitcoin we believe Litcoin is possible with this product. It has an element of FPGA technology and hence this flexibility.

The pricing model for any of these systems will be based a price of GBP £80 per GH/s. So 300 GH/s rig will be E24K. For the Avalon option there will be a cost reduction for chips supplied.

There will be a strictly limited supply for August for units based on CM4. We have enough components available to build 10 sub-racks currently. CM3 based units will be limited by Avalon chip supply and to a lesser extent ancillary parts.

If this of interest to you email us on goliath AT enterpoint.co.uk. Orders for August delivery will need to be placed rapidly to guarantee delivery dates.

[1715295951]

1715295951

[1715295951]

1715295951

[1715295951]

1715295951

[1715295951]

1715295951

[1715295951]

1715295951

[NR3000]

It is very powerful, but very expensive. Maybe a better cheaper, but more? for example, as K1, K16 or K64.

[papamoi]

hi

your price is awfull and unsustainable

[NR3000]

Crainsmore1 [ 800 MH/s ] expensive as well. For 10BTC I can get 5 block erupters [ 5x330=1650 MH/s ]

[yohan]

Crainsmore1 [ 800 MH/s ] expensive as well. For 10BTC I can get 5 block erupters [ 5x330=1650 MH/s ]

Correct me if I am wrong (it's late) but your block erupters are costing 10 BTC ~= £653 for 1.65GH/s. = £395 per GH/s. How is that better than £80 per GH/s for a major piece of engineering?

We are not aiming to be the cheapest with this equipment as some of the supposed maybe competative offerings are way too cheap to be viable as professionally engineered and manufactured products. A rig on this scale needs a lot more engineering than a lash up design of a few chips. That said we think it is good value for this sort of rig. There are not many offerings at the 0.3-0.5 TH/s size range. This is technology that will build 100Th/s rigs and not just hang out of a laptop USB port.

[CanaryInTheMine]

Crainsmore1 [ 800 MH/s ] expensive as well. For 10BTC I can get 5 block erupters [ 5x330=1650 MH/s ]

Correct me if I am wrong (it's late) but your block erupters are costing 10 BTC ~= £653 for 1.65GH/s. = £395 per GH/s. How is that better than £80 per GH/s for a major piece of engineering?

We are not aiming to be the cheapest with this equipment as some of the supposed maybe competative offerings are way too cheap to be viable as professionally engineered and manufactured products. A rig on this scale needs a lot more engineering than a lash up design of a few chips. That said we think it is good value for this sort of rig. There are not many offerings at the 0.3-0.5 TH/s size range. This is technology that will build 100Th/s rigs not hang out of a laptop USB port.

With all due respect... You are not selling designer purses!  Your name/design means nothing in the long run and is not going to allow you to command a price that makes no economic sense simply because they are "professionally engineered".  I can assure you that all delivered open-source projects related to bitcoins are engineered by professionals.

[yohan]

Crainsmore1 [ 800 MH/s ] expensive as well. For 10BTC I can get 5 block erupters [ 5x330=1650 MH/s ]

Correct me if I am wrong (it's late) but your block erupters are costing 10 BTC ~= £653 for 1.65GH/s. = £395 per GH/s. How is that better than £80 per GH/s for a major piece of engineering?

We are not aiming to be the cheapest with this equipment as some of the supposed maybe competative offerings are way too cheap to be viable as professionally engineered and manufactured products. A rig on this scale needs a lot more engineering than a lash up design of a few chips. That said we think it is good value for this sort of rig. There are not many offerings at the 0.3-0.5 TH/s size range. This is technology that will build 100Th/s rigs not hang out of a laptop USB port.

With all due respect... You are not selling designer purses!  Your name/design means nothing in the long run and is not going to allow you to command a price that makes no economic sense simply because they are "professionally engineered".  I can assure you that all delivered open-source projects related to bitcoins are engineered by professionals.

There is a big difference to a company project that has to pay wages/taxes/overheads and non-company project that does not have these costs. Even if a professional engineer or engineers do a project in their spare time it is very different to a company being available behind a project. I could give a longish list of things that won't be available from a solution engineered by even professional people in their spare time. That is in no way any smear of those projects but simple practicality and reality. Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

[CoinHoarder]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do   

[tigerbit]

The system concept is for larger rigs typically using a 19" sub-rack to offer typically 300-500 GH/s depending on the board technology used and that is the unit size that we will initially be selling in.
<snip>

The first technology offering isn't very original in that the base card is based on Avalon chips. The Cairnsmore3 has 144 of Avalon chips on-board. The main reason for offering this technology is purely customer demand and our ability to build units will demend on securing Avalon chips. So it will be for buyers that bring Avalon chips with them.

I'm a little confused re: the CM3 - Avalon option.  Is this 19" rack mount and only for sale packaged up into 300-500 GH/s, or is it for sale by the 144 chip 41 GH/s board?

[yohan]

The system concept is for larger rigs typically using a 19" sub-rack to offer typically 300-500 GH/s depending on the board technology used and that is the unit size that we will initially be selling in.
<snip>

The first technology offering isn't very original in that the base card is based on Avalon chips. The Cairnsmore3 has 144 of Avalon chips on-board. The main reason for offering this technology is purely customer demand and our ability to build units will demend on securing Avalon chips. So it will be for buyers that bring Avalon chips with them.

I'm a little confused re: the CM3 - Avalon option.  Is this 19" rack mount and only for sale packaged up into 300-500 GH/s, or is it for sale by the 144 chip 41 GH/s board?

There are 8 CM3s in this 19" rack option so it is more like 1152 Avalon chips in total between the 8 boards. So basically at the moment we are selling the rack option.

[Milan77]

First of all I must say my personal opinion....

Yohan is honorable member of this community, with projects already done with success on market.
Personally, he replied to me on every message I sent, so he is responsible also.

Only single thing that is under question mark is: is it profitable to buyer.
But it is up to the market to show.

I AM interested in more universal mining device, even based on FPGA technology.
And must again say, if software supported SHA1 salted hacking for SL3 unlocking, I'm ALL IN

[CanaryInTheMine]

Crainsmore1 [ 800 MH/s ] expensive as well. For 10BTC I can get 5 block erupters [ 5x330=1650 MH/s ]

Correct me if I am wrong (it's late) but your block erupters are costing 10 BTC ~= £653 for 1.65GH/s. = £395 per GH/s. How is that better than £80 per GH/s for a major piece of engineering?

We are not aiming to be the cheapest with this equipment as some of the supposed maybe competative offerings are way too cheap to be viable as professionally engineered and manufactured products. A rig on this scale needs a lot more engineering than a lash up design of a few chips. That said we think it is good value for this sort of rig. There are not many offerings at the 0.3-0.5 TH/s size range. This is technology that will build 100Th/s rigs not hang out of a laptop USB port.

With all due respect... You are not selling designer purses!  Your name/design means nothing in the long run and is not going to allow you to command a price that makes no economic sense simply because they are "professionally engineered".  I can assure you that all delivered open-source projects related to bitcoins are engineered by professionals.

There is a big difference to a company project that has to pay wages/taxes/overheads and non-company project that does not have these costs. Even if a professional engineer or engineers do a project in their spare time it is very different to a company being available behind a project. I could give a longish list of things that won't be available from a solution engineered by even professional people in their spare time. That is in no way any smear of those projects but simple practicality and reality. Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

if the price reflects your costs, than say so.  don't beat around the bush with "because I made it therefore I charge more" theme.  I understand if your costs are higher, your price needs to be higher... nothing wrong with that...

[ranlo]

Are you going to wait until you're actually ready to ship these before you take orders, or do you plan to do pre-orders like others and then wait a few months? :p.

And I was a bit confused about your offerings. I get the 85 euro/GH/s, but what types of packages are available?

[Milan77]

Are you going to wait until you're actually ready to ship these before you take orders, or do you plan to do pre-orders like others and then wait a few months? :p.

And I was a bit confused about your offerings. I get the 85 euro/GH/s, but what types of packages are available?

I think that price is quoted for universal mining device with software for it. Based on FPGA technology.
Software is here very important matter. Because it will keep (beside of good engineering design) future proof idea. Yes, nothing is 100% future proof, but will keep market place for longer time and make users happy longer

[newmars]

kind of expensive compared to other products

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209750.0

[Gomeler]

So no chance of a 2-4 blade install? It would be awesome if your blade interface is ASIC agnostic and we could start with a couple AVALON blades, add some BitFury blades, and finish off with some KNC blades.

[ranlo]

Are you going to wait until you're actually ready to ship these before you take orders, or do you plan to do pre-orders like others and then wait a few months? :p.

And I was a bit confused about your offerings. I get the 85 euro/GH/s, but what types of packages are available?

I think that price is quoted for universal mining device with software for it. Based on FPGA technology.
Software is here very important matter. Because it will keep (beside of good engineering design) future proof idea. Yes, nothing is 100% future proof, but will keep market place for longer time and make users happy longer

I am kind of... not really believing we can have a universal (scrypt/sha-256) device like this though, as the two are so different in how they work. I just think that for an FPGA or ASIC to be efficient, it has to choose one or the other and be customized towards that. Otherwise we end up with "novice at many, master of none."

[yohan]

Are you going to wait until you're actually ready to ship these before you take orders, or do you plan to do pre-orders like others and then wait a few months? :p.

And I was a bit confused about your offerings. I get the 85 euro/GH/s, but what types of packages are available?

Basically equipment of this size will be built to order and there will be a deposit so call that a preorder. The main offering will be a complete rack with air cooling and power supplies including within. Beyond this initial offering we are looking things like different sizes and maybe even bringing our Cairnsmore2 to market for the smaller customer.

On timelines we hope to have both CM3 and CM4 prototypes running in the next 2-3 weeks. A lot of work has already been done on our Cairnsmore2 development platform. The main aspect of the timeline is then just the delivery of parts and our manufacturing cycles. We have been working on those aspects for a while so August is quite practical as a delivery date.

[ranlo]

Are you going to wait until you're actually ready to ship these before you take orders, or do you plan to do pre-orders like others and then wait a few months? :p.

And I was a bit confused about your offerings. I get the 85 euro/GH/s, but what types of packages are available?

Basically equipment of this size will be built to order and there will be a deposit so call that a preorder. The main offering will be a complete rack with air cooling and power supplies including within. Beyond this initial offering we are looking things like different sizes and maybe even bringing our Cairnsmore2 to market for the smaller customer.

On timelines we hope to have both CM3 and CM4 prototypes running in the bext 2-3 weeks. A lot of work has already been done on our Cairnsmore2 development platform. The main aspect of the timeline is then just the delivery of parts and our manufacturing cycles. We have been working on those aspects for a while so August is quite practical as a delivery date.

That sounds awesome! How big are the racks, and do you know how much power you're looking at altogether?

[tigerfree]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do   

+1

[cooler-persistence]

Interesting, but more clarity on the offering and diagrams on what a rack looks like would help.

[spiccioli]

By the way a power consumption estimation would be usefull as well, in particular given the price tag.

I'm talking about the unit without Avalon chips or the CM4 if this is its name. 

spiccioli

[yohan]

So no chance of a 2-4 blade install? It would be awesome if your blade interface is ASIC agnostic and we could start with a couple AVALON blades, add some BitFury blades, and finish off with some KNC blades.

We may do smaller versions but the real benefits of this is that it is designed for size. There are so many offerings in the small and middle size already we didn't want to really to drop in there in the early rigs. There is also the issue of managing builds and with the Avalon chip supply coming potentially from customers we simply need to cut down the number of people we are working with in this early phase of production. As with everything we have done so far in the bitcoin world we are aiming to maintain our indicated timelines.

Our vision for this system is that it might have different processing elements and it is kind of modular albeit on a large scale. So to be crystal clear on that we will work with other vendor silicon as much as our own offerings FPGA or ASIC. There is merit in this model as some types of board many not be available to all markets due to export restrictions. CM4 is very likely to be in the export restricted bracket and we are taking advice on that. CM3 with a very fixed function is less likely to be an issue export wise. Beyond CM3/CM4 we have other technology options in progress and being evaluated. No timeline for these before you ask but certainly not soon. It is not a secret that we have been very busy with non-bitcoin side of our business and that is expected to be the case for some months to come yet.

We have been asked what it will look like and basically the answer at the moment is a 19" rack. So not pretty but functional. We have some plans for exterior casings that will allow the unit to go into places that it could be used for water or home heating but those are far from finalised as yet and those are a secondary task. The inital units will be traditional fan driven air cooling.

Control wise some of you may have seen the dimm socket holes on the CM3 CAD picture. That is where our board/rack controllers are going to sit. Initially this will be a combo of a small FPGA and standard processor module that will allow us to run a Linux + MPBM combination but we have other options planned as well. There is an Ethernet and USB interface routed from the socket so each board potentially could run stand alone but we have also made provision to run up to 8 boards from one controller module so a master/slave type operation is possible. This approach gives some advantages in doing other technology options as we get to reuse the same controllers for new technologies.

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

CM4 does not use Avalon chips. Only CM3 uses Avalon chips.

[KS]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

[derr777]

Is my math off or is this a 2+ year potential return in a volatile diff. and currency exchange environment?

Everything depends on your diff estimates, but i'd estimate delivery at 80MM diff.  My guess is you need to take on the risk of having it in stock to sell at these price points, or at least take on the financial risk of buying everything yourself.

What do I know though.. Good luck.

[yohan]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

[yohan]

Is my math off or is this a 2+ year potential return in a volatile diff. and currency exchange environment?

Everything depends on your diff estimates, but i'd estimate delivery at 80MM diff.  My guess is you need to take on the risk of having it in stock to sell at these price points, or at least take on the financial risk of buying everything yourself.

What do I know though.. Good luck.

I would not argue with any financial analysis but on my calculations I would expect a lot faster than that. At best any ROI calculation is a very big guess. I remember a year ago a lot of people saying our CM1 would not make money and we are still making money off our own CM1 rig that we have been using as a development platform. I still expect to make money there for 1 or 2 years in Bitcoin and longer if we make the Litecoin jump. So far at least my guesses have not been too far off over the last year.

If I was to say anything having a rig sooner than later is going to be more important than the actual cost in any ROI calculation or actual profit returned. Remember we are delivering in August for CM4 and sooner for CM3 if chips appear on time.

[pitan]

Interesting will email you my question later

[ocminer]

I cannot recommend Enterpoint products as their support is really bad.. pretty much non-existent..

[ranlo]

Is my math off or is this a 2+ year potential return in a volatile diff. and currency exchange environment?

Everything depends on your diff estimates, but i'd estimate delivery at 80MM diff.  My guess is you need to take on the risk of having it in stock to sell at these price points, or at least take on the financial risk of buying everything yourself.

What do I know though.. Good luck.

I would not argue with any financial analysis but on my calculations I would expect a lot faster than that. At best any ROI calculation is a very big guess. I remember a year ago a lot of people saying our CM1 would not make money and we are still making money off our own CM1 rig that we have been using as a development platform. I still expect to make money there for 1 or 2 years in Bitcoin and longer if we make the Litecoin jump. So far at least my guesses have not been too far off over the last year.

If I was to say anything having a rig sooner than later is going to be more important than the actual cost in any ROI calculation or actual profit returned. Remember we are delivering in August for CM4 and sooner for CM3 if chips appear on time.

As odd as it is, I've been loving your replies so far! What is the current status of the project, though, right now, and how close to release will you be taking orders? I think this could be a great thing if Scrypt mining ends up being proven as an option, rather than a theory.

[KS]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

[yohan]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

[KS]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

Isn't there a way to spread the various "modules" to one or more (adjacent) rack(s) to allow for correct power distribution and cooling?

[yohan]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

Isn't there a way to spread the various "modules" to one or more (adjacent) rack(s) to allow for correct power distribution and cooling?

Technically that would be possible but makes a bit of a mess of the concept. I would probably think you need a better specified data centre than trying to do all of that. The CM3/4 boards could be run totally independently for the cost of a controller per board and these smaller type systems will get looked at later. That is all part of our modular concept in these Goliath Miners. We are trying to keep the initial build simple and not be unachieveably ambitious like certain unmentioned companies. Our aim as always is to do what we have said that we will do. As part of that we don't want too many variations to handle until we get it all bedded down as a system.

[ranlo]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

Isn't there a way to spread the various "modules" to one or more (adjacent) rack(s) to allow for correct power distribution and cooling?

Technically that would be possible but makes a bit of a mess of the concept. I would probably think you need a better specified data centre than trying to do all of that. The CM3/4 boards could be run totally independently for the cost of a controller per board and these smaller type systems will get looked at later. That is all part of our modular concept in these Goliath Miners. We are trying to keep the initial build simple and not be unachieveably ambitious like certain unmentioned companies. Our aim as always is to do what we have said that we will do. As part of that we don't want too many variations to handle until we get it all bedded down as a system.

Assuming you stick with this principle, that's a huge step forward from where other companies have been!

[spiccioli]

So, to sum it up, a CM4 unit:

- costs 24 thousand € / 350 BTCs
- uses 6kW of power
- can do 500 GH/s

Is it right?

If so, at a difficulty of 75 millions, such a unit would produce 3.5 BTCs/day for a ROI of three months more or less.

6kW of power, though, is a lot of power and puts it in the same league of the Avalon where ten units use that much and are capable of 700 GH/s.


spiccioli

[KS]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

Isn't there a way to spread the various "modules" to one or more (adjacent) rack(s) to allow for correct power distribution and cooling?

Technically that would be possible but makes a bit of a mess of the concept. I would probably think you need a better specified data centre than trying to do all of that. The CM3/4 boards could be run totally independently for the cost of a controller per board and these smaller type systems will get looked at later. That is all part of our modular concept in these Goliath Miners. We are trying to keep the initial build simple and not be unachieveably ambitious like certain unmentioned companies. Our aim as always is to do what we have said that we will do. As part of that we don't want too many variations to handle until we get it all bedded down as a system.

I'm in a TierIII+ DC which is just short of top of the line, so I'm not going to start looking for room in one of the 8 TierIV. 20/32A is what you get, the racks are simply not designed for more heat dissipation.

That said, given the racks are next to one another, it's not difficult to get a USB/RJ45 cable from one to the next. At worst, one can always use the DC's patch panel/MeetMe room to interconnect the racks. You said Eth/USB was an option, how do you currently interconnect the boards? (max cable length?)

[crazyearner]

So, to sum it up, a CM4 unit:

- costs 24 thousand € / 350 BTCs
- uses 6kW of power
- can do 500 GH/s

Is it right?

If so, at a difficulty of 75 millions, such a unit would produce 3.5 BTCs/day for a ROI of three months more or less.

6kW of power, though, is a lot of power and puts it in the same league of the Avalon where ten units use that much and are capable of 700 GH/s.


spiccioli

Think you have figures incorrect their my friend 500GH per day will give 16.1 on current difficulty of 15605632 and with 75,605,633 will make 3.3BTC per day

75mill tho is a fair bit off tho to get to that will need a big amount of hash power upped. And if their going to be doing bu AUG sill 1 month turn around and you got your money back depending on market.


F.A.O Yohan  Please can you tell me when you are looking to take orders in for units as am interested and also emailed too

[ranlo]

So, to sum it up, a CM4 unit:

- costs 24 thousand € / 350 BTCs
- uses 6kW of power
- can do 500 GH/s

Is it right?

If so, at a difficulty of 75 millions, such a unit would produce 3.5 BTCs/day for a ROI of three months more or less.

6kW of power, though, is a lot of power and puts it in the same league of the Avalon where ten units use that much and are capable of 700 GH/s.


spiccioli

Think you have figures incorrect their my friend 500GH per day will give 16.1 on current difficulty of 15605632 and with 75,605,633 will make 3.3BTC per day

75mill tho is a fair bit off tho to get to that will need a big amount of hash power upped. And if their going to be doing bu AUG sill 1 month turn around and you got your money back depending on market.


F.A.O Yohan  Please can you tell me when you are looking to take orders in for units as am interested and also emailed too

Keep in mind that if they sell, say 10 of these, at 500 GH/s, that's another 5 TH/s out to increase difficulty as well. While the difficulty may be rising slowly right now, as the more high powered systems go out there it's going to increase fast.

[crazyearner]

So, to sum it up, a CM4 unit:

- costs 24 thousand € / 350 BTCs
- uses 6kW of power
- can do 500 GH/s

Is it right?

If so, at a difficulty of 75 millions, such a unit would produce 3.5 BTCs/day for a ROI of three months more or less.

6kW of power, though, is a lot of power and puts it in the same league of the Avalon where ten units use that much and are capable of 700 GH/s.


spiccioli

Think you have figures incorrect their my friend 500GH per day will give 16.1 on current difficulty of 15605632 and with 75,605,633 will make 3.3BTC per day

75mill tho is a fair bit off tho to get to that will need a big amount of hash power upped. And if their going to be doing bu AUG sill 1 month turn around and you got your money back depending on market.


F.A.O Yohan  Please can you tell me when you are looking to take orders in for units as am interested and also emailed too

Keep in mind that if they sell, say 10 of these, at 500 GH/s, that's another 5 TH/s out to increase difficulty as well. While the difficulty may be rising slowly right now, as the more high powered systems go out there it's going to increase fast.

Stil ltho not many people with this type of hash power are actually mining all Bitcoin their mining other sha256d coins and myself would too but bitcoin to begin and so on.

[yohan]

Power wise we are aiming for a maximum of 6KW with a CM4 solution but we are hoping to get 500GH/s at that. There is still more work to be done on this to confirm that so that number may be a little off. A CM3 solution is likely to be somewhat better at maybe 3KW at 300MH/s based on published figures. For some customer/countries the 6KW may be an issue and we may alter the unit spec a little to work in with what customer sites can support. In the UK many domestic ring mains are 30A at a nominal 230V so you can see why we are aiming at the 6KW. As most houses here only have mains feeds of 60-100A it is also something of a practical rig limit in taking half or one third of an available supply. Obviously if we are looking at industrial units or data centre operation that is maybe a different situation.

I'm not sure where your focus is at. You are building 19" racks for the home??

I would be interested in a solution that can be integrated in a DC. Right now that means no more than 10A @ 230V usual and 16A peak per half rack. Double for full 42U rack. So, rack space is not an issue but power usage is (meaning 3KW or 6KW are problematic values).

We are using the 19" rack as a convenient and cost effective building block and to keep our mechanical design effort down. At least for the moment a big percentage of Bitcoiners operate their rigs at home and that is what we are thinking of in the design. It may be that the comms side of Bitcoin mining will eventually force everyone into data centres but that may be countered by better broadband rollout. Many miners won't want to pay for a data centre.

The full rack with CM4 will give you an issue in your data center if all you get is 20A for a full rack. A single full CM3 based rack should be ok if you have 20A. Beyond what we are doing initially there may a couple of things that may. First is the use of a different technology may bring down the power. Secondly we have a project still for our own custom data center and that is on-going. It won't be restricted by power feed as you are.

The finished CM3/4 rack is expected be 12-18U high once we have all the cooling and power supplies in site. As that mechanical design is not finalised I may be a little off and it might grow to 24U high but I doubt any more than that. When we get to the water coooled version we may also be able to increase density as well.

OK. So it's a very expensive home system, not DC oriented equipment.

One thing we can do with this is use multiple power feeds. A CM3 based system will use 2-4 power supplies and a CM4 based one 4-6 PSUs. So if you can get enough feeds that may be a way around your issue. Until lower power options exist then you will always have an issue in your data centre whatever kit you use.

Isn't there a way to spread the various "modules" to one or more (adjacent) rack(s) to allow for correct power distribution and cooling?

Technically that would be possible but makes a bit of a mess of the concept. I would probably think you need a better specified data centre than trying to do all of that. The CM3/4 boards could be run totally independently for the cost of a controller per board and these smaller type systems will get looked at later. That is all part of our modular concept in these Goliath Miners. We are trying to keep the initial build simple and not be unachieveably ambitious like certain unmentioned companies. Our aim as always is to do what we have said that we will do. As part of that we don't want too many variations to handle until we get it all bedded down as a system.

I'm in a TierIII+ DC which is just short of top of the line, so I'm not going to start looking for room in one of the 8 TierIV. 20/32A is what you get, the racks are simply not designed for more heat dissipation.

That said, given the racks are next to one another, it's not difficult to get a USB/RJ45 cable from one to the next. At worst, one can always use the DC's patch panel/MeetMe room to interconnect the racks. You said Eth/USB was an option, how do you currently interconnect the boards? (max cable length?)

The we have laid down links are notionally LVDS over ribbon cable so could maybe go further than planned especially as speed doesn't have to be huge. Also because of the way have done the controller a special version could done fairly cheaply maybe add drivers for longer distances or even extra Ethernet etc. Inter-board using the Ethernet using a local hub/switch is also possible. Basically there is a lot of flexibility in the design.

[rammy2k2]

I cannot recommend Enterpoint products as their support is really bad.. pretty much non-existent..

why u say that ?

[crazyearner]

Hello and good afternoon yohan.  I have a few questions for you if you have a moment spare.

Q1 Will you provide units that are for the 300GH units be in sections so you could buy say 1 modual or rack and then buy another and add to it a bit like Avalon buying say 3 modual and adding a 4th and 5th or buying 1 and working up to the max can fit.

Q2 About power use is this going to be quoted the full 6kw or is this going to be tuned up too in time like firmware releases to reduce power use or upgrade parts etc?

Q3 About Prices Is this including shipping and also tax or is this excluding tax GBP price and shipping?

Q4 What payment methods will you be accepting for payment for such amounts?

Q4 How big will the units be when cased up height,wight,length etc?

Q5 What cooling will you provide for the units will this be Air or will you also have options for going fully water cooled with tank and other bits?

I look forward to hearing back from you. Thx for taking the time to answer them if you get a moment and if you have another could you read emails as sent one in regarding a number of things.

Again thx for stepping out and taking time to answer the above.

[yohan]

So, to sum it up, a CM4 unit:

- costs 24 thousand € / 350 BTCs
- uses 6kW of power
- can do 500 GH/s

Is it right?

If so, at a difficulty of 75 millions, such a unit would produce 3.5 BTCs/day for a ROI of three months more or less.

6kW of power, though, is a lot of power and puts it in the same league of the Avalon where ten units use that much and are capable of 700 GH/s.


spiccioli

Think you have figures incorrect their my friend 500GH per day will give 16.1 on current difficulty of 15605632 and with 75,605,633 will make 3.3BTC per day

75mill tho is a fair bit off tho to get to that will need a big amount of hash power upped. And if their going to be doing bu AUG sill 1 month turn around and you got your money back depending on market.


F.A.O Yohan  Please can you tell me when you are looking to take orders in for units as am interested and also emailed too

We are looking to take orders asap so we can secure enough silicon for everyone interested. It is riding off the back of one our other orders and we don't often order amounts of silicon this large. So if we miss ordering now there is some possibility we can't offer the current price again. Behind all these we have other solutions planned for the system but what gets offered and the price will depend on many things. So in summary if you want the £80/GH offer for August you have to order asap. Hard order closure will happen once we hit late July / early August manufacturing limits or in approximately 7 days whichever comes first. We will buy a certain amount of extra silicon over hard orders but that will be strictly limited by our cashflow constraints.

[yohan]

Hello and good afternoon yohan.  I have a few questions for you if you have a moment spare.

Q1 Will you provide units that are for the 300GH units be in sections so you could buy say 1 modual or rack and then buy another and add to it a bit like Avalon buying say 3 modual and adding a 4th and 5th or buying 1 and working up to the max can fit.

We won't probably do that in the initial first weeks but once we have it lunched and bedded down that is possible. A lot depends on chip availability.

Q2 About power use is this going to be quoted the full 6kw or is this going to be tuned up too in time like firmware releases to reduce power use or upgrade parts etc?

The 6KW is the CM4 target and it will vary with FPGA builds. There may be bonus performance in CM4 as we improve builds but that isn't guaranteed. The guarantee will be what we charge you for. CM3 should be a bit lighter on power and on specs we have that is about 2.5W per chip so 1152 chips = 2880W which might be more like 3200W out of the wall. Until the prototypes are working we won't have final numbers.

Q3 About Prices Is this including shipping and also tax or is this excluding tax GBP price and shipping?

Shipping and tax are extra.

Q4 What payment methods will you be accepting for payment for such amounts?

Bank transfer, Bitcoins and Avalon Chips.

Q4 How big will the units be when cased up height,wight,length etc?

Target for the air cooling is 18U high and standard 19" width so roughly 70cm / 28" high by 48cm / 19" and depth about 45cm/18". These dimensions are not finalised yet so may vary a little. I don't have any good numbers yet for the weight.

Q5 What cooling will you provide for the units will this be Air or will you also have options for going fully water cooled with tank and other bits?

The air cooling units will come ready to turn on so heatsinks and fans are all installed. On a water installation there is a choice whether to fit a pump or not so there will be input and output manifold to distribute/collect water connected up to the units. The pump may be better sourced locally or using an existing one if you have heating system already with one available. We can not guarantee water cooling will be available in early units but retrofit may be possible.

I look forward to hearing back from you. Thx for taking the time to answer them if you get a moment and if you have another could you read emails as sent one in regarding a number of things.

Again thx for stepping out and taking time to answer the above.

[rocks]

We are looking to take orders asap so we can secure enough silicon for everyone interested. It is riding off the back of one our other orders and we don't often order amounts of silicon this large. So if we miss ordering now there is some possibility we can't offer the current price again. Behind all these we have other solutions planned for the system but what gets offered and the price will depend on many things. So in summary if you want the £80/GH offer for August you have to order asap. Hard order closure will happen once we hit late July / early August manufacturing limits or in approximately 7 days whichever comes first. We will buy a certain amount of extra silicon over hard orders but that will be strictly limited by our cashflow constraints.

Hi Yohan,

Thanks for providing your responses so far. I was one of the people who expressed early interest in this project, so here is my situation with additional questions. I suspect many others considering Goliath are in a similar situation.

Basically once I gained confidence in the Avalon chip order process and open sourced boards I jumped on board and now have several K16s on order. Open sourced K16 boards are offered at a very attractive Gh/$ price point, which is perfect for home builds because you just stack them in the garage with spacers and fans... However it is only reasonable to build a home rig in the 1~3kW range.

So, if I plan to expand I pretty much have to go into a data center. My options in a DC are :
1) Home build 4U, 8U, etc racks with open-sourced K16 boards
2) Purchase Goliath racks

As a result I need to understand :
a) How Goliath would fit into a DC. This mainly means the minimum block size and power draw so that I can configure that and fit it into a DC environment with their pricing options. For example 12U blocks drawing 120V 10A each.
b) How Goliath compares to a home build option.

The "high-power" DCs in my area seem to top out at 120V 40A per rack. To optimize this I was considering building 8U appliances drawing 10A each for 40A total in a single rack with four 8U appliances in each rack. Working in blocks of 5A or 10A increments seems to be best here.

Thanks,

[pitan]

We are looking to take orders asap so we can secure enough silicon for everyone interested. It is riding off the back of one our other orders and we don't often order amounts of silicon this large. So if we miss ordering now there is some possibility we can't offer the current price again. Behind all these we have other solutions planned for the system but what gets offered and the price will depend on many things. So in summary if you want the £80/GH offer for August you have to order asap. Hard order closure will happen once we hit late July / early August manufacturing limits or in approximately 7 days whichever comes first. We will buy a certain amount of extra silicon over hard orders but that will be strictly limited by our cashflow constraints.

Hi Yohan,

Thanks for providing your responses so far. I was one of the people who expressed early interest in this project, so here is my situation with additional questions. I suspect many others considering Goliath are in a similar situation.

Basically once I gained confidence in the Avalon chip order process and open sourced boards I jumped on board and now have several K16s on order. Open sourced K16 boards are offered at a very attractive Gh/$ price point, which is perfect for home builds because you just stack them in the garage with spacers and fans... However it is only reasonable to build a home rig in the 1~3kW range.

So, if I plan to expand I pretty much have to go into a data center. My options in a DC are :
1) Home build 4U, 8U, etc racks with open-sourced K16 boards
2) Purchase Goliath racks

As a result I need to understand :
a) How Goliath would fit into a DC. This mainly means the minimum block size and power draw so that I can configure that and fit it into a DC environment with their pricing options. For example 12U blocks drawing 120V 10A each.
b) How Goliath compares to a home build option.

The "high-power" DCs in my area seem to top out at 120V 40A per rack. To optimize this I was considering building 8U appliances drawing 10A each for 40A total in a single rack with four 8U appliances in each rack. Working in blocks of 5A or 10A increments seems to be best here.

Thanks,

+1 on that regarding DC

[markm]

So what is the CM4? Does it have ASICs? If so from where? Or is it made out of FPGAs somehow brought way down in price (and power requirement?)?

-MarkM-

[yohan]

We are looking to take orders asap so we can secure enough silicon for everyone interested. It is riding off the back of one our other orders and we don't often order amounts of silicon this large. So if we miss ordering now there is some possibility we can't offer the current price again. Behind all these we have other solutions planned for the system but what gets offered and the price will depend on many things. So in summary if you want the £80/GH offer for August you have to order asap. Hard order closure will happen once we hit late July / early August manufacturing limits or in approximately 7 days whichever comes first. We will buy a certain amount of extra silicon over hard orders but that will be strictly limited by our cashflow constraints.

Hi Yohan,

Thanks for providing your responses so far. I was one of the people who expressed early interest in this project, so here is my situation with additional questions. I suspect many others considering Goliath are in a similar situation.

Basically once I gained confidence in the Avalon chip order process and open sourced boards I jumped on board and now have several K16s on order. Open sourced K16 boards are offered at a very attractive Gh/$ price point, which is perfect for home builds because you just stack them in the garage with spacers and fans... However it is only reasonable to build a home rig in the 1~3kW range.

So, if I plan to expand I pretty much have to go into a data center. My options in a DC are :
1) Home build 4U, 8U, etc racks with open-sourced K16 boards
2) Purchase Goliath racks

As a result I need to understand :
a) How Goliath would fit into a DC. This mainly means the minimum block size and power draw so that I can configure that and fit it into a DC environment with their pricing options. For example 12U blocks drawing 120V 10A each.
b) How Goliath compares to a home build option.

The "high-power" DCs in my area seem to top out at 120V 40A per rack. To optimize this I was considering building 8U appliances drawing 10A each for 40A total in a single rack with four 8U appliances in each rack. Working in blocks of 5A or 10A increments seems to be best here.

Thanks,

Ok so what could be done is that systems are adjusted to fit a DC capabilities. So the obvious way is to fit less cards per system. So 10A at 120V is only 1200W and that is assuming a good power factor. We are maybe looking at each CM3 card taking about 400W so 2 or 3 cards per power input might make sense. If a Goliath rack was fitted with 4 PSUs you could power 8 boards taking 4 x 10A feeds you have available. If you really want to push the space then 1.5 racks is just about possible or stay comfortable at 8 boards or 1 full rack.

The big difference with Goliath is that it is designed to go big and it has a good packing density compared to K16.  You also get the pain of manufacturing removed by paying us to do that in the cost. When you start working at these sizes it becomes a very different design and manufacture problem compared to a K16. That is not in any way being critical of K16 and it has it's place in the mining field.

Over the last 16 months that we have been involved in Bitcoin mining we have learned a lot and I think we still are learning more. We did CM1 last year and that has proved to be a very good product, popular with customers, and with excellent reliability except when placed in torrent of water. Outside of the early phase deliveries the number that have come back to see us on warranty I can count on one hand. That product whilst very simple has taught us a lot in what needed to be done in the Goliath Miner. CM2 which nobody outside of Enterpoint has seen in the flesh has also helped in furthering our ideas and developments. Another little known secret is that we have our own mining software and that might be cut into these miners if we think that is the best way to go. That may offer product stability over third party builds that we have no control over "updates". We will talk more about this aspect as we integrate the design in July.

[yohan]

So what is the CM4? Does it have ASICs? If so from where? Or is it made out of FPGAs somehow brought way down in price (and power requirement?)?

-MarkM-

It is commercially too sensitive to for this level of detail to be revealed in open disscussion at this point. Outside of the performance offered, unit power, and what the cost is to customers that won't ever be discussed by us in this forum before customers have units in their hands. However you are free to speculate as much as you like.

[crazyearner]

Hello yohan again. Thank you very much for answering my questions. I  just have 1 more regarding the orders Would it be possible to put money down now for an order and put a deposit down on 1x unit and pay as my group comes up with the funds or pay for a basic system and have this on like a buy now build up process a bit like I want an order for the big unit and have this sent in parts ie pay for part working system that provides hashing power and continue to pay for parts and have them shipped.. I can go through back details and invoice for an order within the next week or less and go through payment details and setting some sort of contract out.

My last question that has just spring to mind is about the CM3 and CM4 is their details of what these will provide will they be a bit like the jalas that BFL have like 5GH and 20GH and so forth or is their no details on this yet.

[spiccioli]

So what is the CM4? Does it have ASICs? If so from where? Or is it made out of FPGAs somehow brought way down in price (and power requirement?)?

-MarkM-

It is commercially too sensitive to for this level of detail to be revealed in open disscussion at this point. Outside of the performance offered, unit power, and what the cost is to customers that won't ever be discussed by us in this forum before customers have units in their hands. However you are free to speculate as much as you like.

Being that CM4 uses 1.5 times the energy of Avalon units with similar hashing power I'd say that it contains some high end FPGAs that Enterpoint can buy with a substantial discount because they're ordering a ton of them for some other project they're doing.

spiccioli.

[rocks]

Ok so what could be done is that systems are adjusted to fit a DC capabilities. So the obvious way is to fit less cards per system. So 10A at 120V is only 1200W and that is assuming a good power factor. We are maybe looking at each CM3 card taking about 400W so 2 or 3 cards per power input might make sense. If a Goliath rack was fitted with 4 PSUs you could power 8 boards taking 4 x 10A feeds you have available. If you really want to push the space then 1.5 racks is just about possible or stay comfortable at 8 boards or 1 full rack.

The big difference with Goliath is that it is designed to go big and it has a good packing density compared to K16.  You also get the pain of manufacturing removed by paying us to do that in the cost. When you start working at these sizes it becomes a very different design and manufacture problem compared to a K16. That is not in any way being critical of K16 and it has it's place in the mining field.

Over the last 16 months that we have been involved in Bitcoin mining we have learned a lot and I think we still are learning more. We did CM1 last year and that has proved to be a very good product, popular with customers, and with excellent reliability except when placed in torrent of water. Outside of the early phase deliveries the number that have come back to see us on warranty I can count on one hand. That product whilst very simple has taught us a lot in what needed to be done in the Goliath Miner. CM2 which nobody outside of Enterpoint has seen in the flesh has also helped in furthering our ideas and developments. Another little known secret is that we have our own mining software and that might be cut into these miners if we think that is the best way to go. That may offer product stability over third party builds that we have no control over "updates". We will talk more about this aspect as we integrate the design in July.

Thanks again for the replies Yohan, the following is simply feedback from the perspective of my needs (and is not mean to be critial of the project).

I am completely on board with the density focus of Goliath. The issue I am having is for home builds density is not much of an issue, just look at how most people stacked large CM1 builds. That is the easy way to do it in the home. As a result, I have always seen Goliath as a potential DC build, and I suspect others did as well.

Where I see density being useful is in a DC environment to lower total costs. The issue here is power draw limits density. In the Goliath configuration only 8 boards are supported within a single rack due to power, that is not very dense. So in a DC you end up paying for space that is not used.

Another issue is a DC build should EXACTLY draw the power paid for. If you have 10A assigned to a 10U appliance, then that appliance should draw exactly 10A. If it draws 9.9A it is wasting 0.1A. In the build described above 2 boards drawing 800 watts is not DC efficient, and 3 boards at 1200 watts trips over the limit, which makes it not cost effective.

Overall I am begining to come to the conclusion that builds based on Avalon chips or FGPAs draw too power to be long-term cost effective in a DC environment due to the limit on density. However, my guess is builds based on next gen 50nm Avalon's or BFL chips will be able to achieve an attractive density matched to DC power availablity.

In other words, if we had ASICs that draw half or a quarter of the power of current Avalon chips, then one could really take advantage of the density Goliath offers. That would then get interesting for a large DC build-out.

[yohan]

Ok so what could be done is that systems are adjusted to fit a DC capabilities. So the obvious way is to fit less cards per system. So 10A at 120V is only 1200W and that is assuming a good power factor. We are maybe looking at each CM3 card taking about 400W so 2 or 3 cards per power input might make sense. If a Goliath rack was fitted with 4 PSUs you could power 8 boards taking 4 x 10A feeds you have available. If you really want to push the space then 1.5 racks is just about possible or stay comfortable at 8 boards or 1 full rack.

The big difference with Goliath is that it is designed to go big and it has a good packing density compared to K16.  You also get the pain of manufacturing removed by paying us to do that in the cost. When you start working at these sizes it becomes a very different design and manufacture problem compared to a K16. That is not in any way being critical of K16 and it has it's place in the mining field.

Over the last 16 months that we have been involved in Bitcoin mining we have learned a lot and I think we still are learning more. We did CM1 last year and that has proved to be a very good product, popular with customers, and with excellent reliability except when placed in torrent of water. Outside of the early phase deliveries the number that have come back to see us on warranty I can count on one hand. That product whilst very simple has taught us a lot in what needed to be done in the Goliath Miner. CM2 which nobody outside of Enterpoint has seen in the flesh has also helped in furthering our ideas and developments. Another little known secret is that we have our own mining software and that might be cut into these miners if we think that is the best way to go. That may offer product stability over third party builds that we have no control over "updates". We will talk more about this aspect as we integrate the design in July.

Thanks again for the replies Yohan, the following is simply feedback from the perspective of my needs (and is not mean to be critial of the project).

I am completely on board with the density focus of Goliath. The issue I am having is for home builds density is not much of an issue, just look at how most people stacked large CM1 builds. That is the easy way to do it in the home. As a result, I have always seen Goliath as a potential DC build, and I suspect others did as well.

Where I see density being useful is in a DC environment to lower total costs. The issue here is power draw limits density. In the Goliath configuration only 8 boards are supported within a single rack due to power, that is not very dense. So in a DC you end up paying for space that is not used.

Another issue is a DC build should EXACTLY draw the power paid for. If you have 10A assigned to a 10U appliance, then that appliance should draw exactly 10A. If it draws 9.9A it is wasting 0.1A. In the build described above 2 boards drawing 800 watts is not DC efficient, and 3 boards at 1200 watts trips over the limit, which makes it not cost effective.

Overall I am begining to come to the conclusion that builds based on Avalon chips or FGPAs draw too power to be long-term cost effective in a DC environment due to the limit on density. However, my guess is builds based on next gen 50nm Avalon's or BFL chips will be able to achieve an attractive density matched to DC power availablity.

In other words, if we had ASICs that draw half or a quarter of the power of current Avalon chips, then one could really take advantage of the density Goliath offers. That would then get interesting for a large DC build-out.

To put this into context this is a solution for more less now and we do see CM3 and CM4 being superceeded by CM5 and later "engine" boards. In Bitcoin product lifetimes are always going to be very short and the design we are doing is influenced by that. 90% the work that goes into the early CM3/4 systems will be reused in CM5 onwards and it is entirely possible in time that a single rack could even be comprised of 1 each of CM3, CM4, CM5, CM6, CM7, CM8, CM9 and CM10 to be extreme. That forward progression is our big design aim and the underlying technology can change very quickly to the latest and still work with older elements of a rig. With firmware updates the controllers we supply should be able to run with the newer technology as well. Eventually the standard may have to change say because of some restriction in I/O bandwidth but when we get to that point we will attempt to support a migration usage for "old" boards. That might be a faster Controller or one that has say 10G Ethernet. Whatever the challenge is we will try and bring the older boards along with the new designs.

If you are going to try and fine tune to use 100% the power supply of a DC you are likely to generate costs much more elsewhere in your rig in some other inefficiency. Some would argue that the DC itself is an unnecessary cost and that is why we want to make it capabile of running at home. We also think the potential for heating homes is much more useful than convenience maybe of a DC. It is certainly slightly greener. Also if you are in the camp argueing for hashing to be distributed a lot more then DCs are bad news. You could have 10000 miners basically in same building and they don't not know that. Lose that one building by whatever reason and you lose a big amount of the network. In our own DC plan we have done some thinking about all of these aspects.

[Schrankwand]

There is a big difference to a company project that has to pay wages/taxes/overheads and non-company project that does not have these costs. Even if a professional engineer or engineers do a project in their spare time it is very different to a company being available behind a project. I could give a longish list of things that won't be available from a solution engineered by even professional people in their spare time. That is in no way any smear of those projects but simple practicality and reality. Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

While I understand that, the model you provided looks incredibly similar to a single person commercial build around... so I don't want to bitch and did some calc.

The burnin variation including avalon chips comes for me, at around 250€ including chips, VAT, manufacturing in factory that caters from small timers to the german military.

Wages in germany are ridiculously expensive.

So I don't really understand how someone can create a quality product (Including ridiculous German warranty) while doing all this and still make good money. We are talking 44€ vs. 95 Euros. I could understand, 50, 60, even 70 Euros. But more than a double premium on someone who has already hopefully more than a 200% markup?


What I want to say is, I like to invest in premium products. I have money coming towards bitcoin. For me as a customer, what advantages does your product get me compared to other products? I did understand this with GPUs, since your FPGA beats GPUs and others were similarly priced. With Avalon Asics, I don't get the premium.

Then again, sure, at current difficulty you will break even in one month, at further difficulty at 40-50 million you might do it in two to three, totally acceptable. But what advantage does your board have over the Bitburner boards? Or the K384?

[dogie]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do   

+1

We don't say "OMG OP" for any other reason than to help you. We are potential customers saying, if you dont lower price, we wont purchase. You can listen or not, but companies pay big bucks to here why people aren't buying.

[yohan]

There is a big difference to a company project that has to pay wages/taxes/overheads and non-company project that does not have these costs. Even if a professional engineer or engineers do a project in their spare time it is very different to a company being available behind a project. I could give a longish list of things that won't be available from a solution engineered by even professional people in their spare time. That is in no way any smear of those projects but simple practicality and reality. Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

While I understand that, the model you provided looks incredibly similar to a single person commercial build around... so I don't want to bitch and did some calc.

The burnin variation including avalon chips comes for me, at around 250€ including chips, VAT, manufacturing in factory that caters from small timers to the german military.

Wages in germany are ridiculously expensive.

So I don't really understand how someone can create a quality product (Including ridiculous German warranty) while doing all this and still make good money. We are talking 44€ vs. 95 Euros. I could understand, 50, 60, even 70 Euros. But more than a double premium on someone who has already hopefully more than a 200% markup?


What I want to say is, I like to invest in premium products. I have money coming towards bitcoin. For me as a customer, what advantages does your product get me compared to other products? I did understand this with GPUs, since your FPGA beats GPUs and others were similarly priced. With Avalon Asics, I don't get the premium.

Then again, sure, at current difficulty you will break even in one month, at further difficulty at 40-50 million you might do it in two to three, totally acceptable. But what advantage does your board have over the Bitburner boards? Or the K384?

Costs can be argued about what is good or bad. I have not been following other Avalon based designs in any depth so anything I say is based on limited knowledge. I think the Burnin boards are using a USB interface and that is one we wanted to get away from. It's not great for a big design as we found out with CM1. When you get to 256 COM ports you are stuffed in Windows and maybe Linux too. The CM3 design will have a controller running Linux and miner software so doesn't need a host as such with those issues. We do have a USB interface but that is for special cases or maintainance.

The K384 I don't know much at all so can't make a comment on what they are doing.

With Avalon chips there are some particular problems with offering warranties. I'm not saying this as any insult or other bad mouthing of what Avalon have done but wearing my pro hat they are a supplier with next to no track record and barely have any normal business presence or support. Now if you said to most companies like us they wouldn't touch those chips with a 100 mile bargepole. It fails all the business due diligence tests that are normal. So what does that mean in practicality? It means that you might have poor quality in the design or manufacturing. It might also mean non-working chips arriving. It might mean chips don't appear at all. As a business that represents a huge risk in warranty and litigation. It might also mean a lot of support work and costs. Probably worst of all it could be pissed off customers. I certainly don't want Enterpoint being described in the same BFL is currently. So that is the context we set our prices for CM3. Remember also that CM3 is mainly being done as a service to customers because they asked for it and we can do it in tandem with CM4.

ROI is always going to a difficult one. ROI also changes depending on whether you consider it in flat or BTC. A year ago people talked of an exchange rate that might some day exceed $100/coin. We have been 2.5X that over the last few months. That change has made a big difference in flat profit levels. If we went back to $10/coin flat profits might not be a profit.

In BTC you might say 1/10 of last years BTC earnings is now crap. At best Bitcoin mining is a gamble and you back you horse i.e. equipment to make you money. So in context in buying our equipment we think most customers have, or will, make money and hopefully that will continue to be the case.

[yohan]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do   

+1

We don't say "OMG OP" for any other reason than to help you. We are potential customers saying, if you dont lower price, we wont purchase. You can listen or not, but companies pay big bucks to here why people aren't buying.

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.

We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.

I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.

[KS]

Ok so what could be done is that systems are adjusted to fit a DC capabilities. So the obvious way is to fit less cards per system. So 10A at 120V is only 1200W and that is assuming a good power factor. We are maybe looking at each CM3 card taking about 400W so 2 or 3 cards per power input might make sense. If a Goliath rack was fitted with 4 PSUs you could power 8 boards taking 4 x 10A feeds you have available. If you really want to push the space then 1.5 racks is just about possible or stay comfortable at 8 boards or 1 full rack.

The big difference with Goliath is that it is designed to go big and it has a good packing density compared to K16.  You also get the pain of manufacturing removed by paying us to do that in the cost. When you start working at these sizes it becomes a very different design and manufacture problem compared to a K16. That is not in any way being critical of K16 and it has it's place in the mining field.

Over the last 16 months that we have been involved in Bitcoin mining we have learned a lot and I think we still are learning more. We did CM1 last year and that has proved to be a very good product, popular with customers, and with excellent reliability except when placed in torrent of water. Outside of the early phase deliveries the number that have come back to see us on warranty I can count on one hand. That product whilst very simple has taught us a lot in what needed to be done in the Goliath Miner. CM2 which nobody outside of Enterpoint has seen in the flesh has also helped in furthering our ideas and developments. Another little known secret is that we have our own mining software and that might be cut into these miners if we think that is the best way to go. That may offer product stability over third party builds that we have no control over "updates". We will talk more about this aspect as we integrate the design in July.

Thanks again for the replies Yohan, the following is simply feedback from the perspective of my needs (and is not mean to be critial of the project).

I am completely on board with the density focus of Goliath. The issue I am having is for home builds density is not much of an issue, just look at how most people stacked large CM1 builds. That is the easy way to do it in the home. As a result, I have always seen Goliath as a potential DC build, and I suspect others did as well.

Where I see density being useful is in a DC environment to lower total costs. The issue here is power draw limits density. In the Goliath configuration only 8 boards are supported within a single rack due to power, that is not very dense. So in a DC you end up paying for space that is not used.

Another issue is a DC build should EXACTLY draw the power paid for. If you have 10A assigned to a 10U appliance, then that appliance should draw exactly 10A. If it draws 9.9A it is wasting 0.1A. In the build described above 2 boards drawing 800 watts is not DC efficient, and 3 boards at 1200 watts trips over the limit, which makes it not cost effective.

Overall I am begining to come to the conclusion that builds based on Avalon chips or FGPAs draw too power to be long-term cost effective in a DC environment due to the limit on density. However, my guess is builds based on next gen 50nm Avalon's or BFL chips will be able to achieve an attractive density matched to DC power availablity.

In other words, if we had ASICs that draw half or a quarter of the power of current Avalon chips, then one could really take advantage of the density Goliath offers. That would then get interesting for a large DC build-out.

This ^

I think their power values and unit sizes should be revised. Besides, unless you make a dedicated server room with proper cooling and cabling, there is no way to run a 6KW heater in your home. That's just crazy/stupid (or both) and generally unwise/dangerous.

[KS]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do   

+1

We don't say "OMG OP" for any other reason than to help you. We are potential customers saying, if you dont lower price, we wont purchase. You can listen or not, but companies pay big bucks to here why people aren't buying.

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.

We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.

I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.

Good for you!

But I'm still scratching my head at your targeting the retail market with such a product.

[RoadStress]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do   

+1

We don't say "OMG OP" for any other reason than to help you. We are potential customers saying, if you dont lower price, we wont purchase. You can listen or not, but companies pay big bucks to here why people aren't buying.

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.

We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.

I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.

Good for you!

But I'm still scratching my head at your targeting the retail market with such a product.

Maybe there are some potential clients from his customer base that aren't so aware of the other bitcoin mining hardware.  Why don't you just let him be? Let him sell 1Ghash for 1 mil $. If he finds customers then his win, if not then his loss. Not yours.

[KS]

Ultimately if you don't like our price then go elsewhere or design your own. There is no obligation to buy.

Will do    

+1

We don't say "OMG OP" for any other reason than to help you. We are potential customers saying, if you dont lower price, we wont purchase. You can listen or not, but companies pay big bucks to here why people aren't buying.

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.

We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.

I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.

Good for you!

But I'm still scratching my head at your targeting the retail market with such a product.

Maybe there are some potential clients from his customer base that aren't so aware of the other bitcoin mining hardware.  Why don't you just let him be? Let him sell 1Ghash for 1 mil $. If he finds customers then his win, if not then his loss. Not yours.

That's because I find his product interesting but it doesn't fit into a professional setting. His design is close enough (IMO) that it could be adapted to serve both markets. Win-win. I get to fit that in my business plan and he finds more customers without losing his current base.

[dodegkr]

+1

[Syke]

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s?

Avalon batch3 will arrive long before your device. Therefore your device is worth much less than the Avalon pre-order.

75 BTC several months ago had a great chance at decent ROI. 75 BTC now for a device several months from now is questionable whether it will ever break even.

[dodegkr]

last time i checked august was a few weeks away

[yohan]

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s?

Avalon batch3 will arrive long before your device. Therefore your device is worth much less than the Avalon pre-order.

75 BTC several months ago had a great chance at decent ROI. 75 BTC now for a device several months from now is questionable whether it will ever break even.

That is only if it arrives before August of course and in one piece. So far we have always pretty much kept our delivery promises and not slipped 3 months or as some suppliers nearly 1 year on delivering a promised product. We have set our prices and if people don't like them they don't buy. That actually doesn't matter as we can probably make more out adding anything spare from this build into our mining rig than straight selling kit so for us it is as simple as that.

[dex1]

Just to get the figures right...

The pricing model for any of these systems will be based a price of GBP £80 per GH/s. So 300 GH/s rig will be E24K. For the Avalon option there will be a cost reduction for chips supplied.

So, to sum it up, a CM4 unit:

- costs 24 thousand € / 350 BTCs
- uses 6kW of power
- can do 500 GH/s

Is it right?

If so, at a difficulty of 75 millions, such a unit would produce 3.5 BTCs/day for a ROI of three months more or less.

6kW of power, though, is a lot of power and puts it in the same league of the Avalon where ten units use that much and are capable of 700 GH/s.


spiccioli

I belive there is a typo in OP. As the price is £80 per GH/s so 300 GH/s makes it £24000 (GBP and not EUR).

Also please bear in mind yohan's answer for crazyearner's question:

Q3 About Prices Is this including shipping and also tax or is this excluding tax GBP price and shipping?

Shipping and tax are extra.

So you are looking at 28800 GBP=33903 EUR=45227 USD plus shipping costs on top of it.

I used to be CM1 user, which device I hold in high esteem because it was reliable and affordable but obviously Enterpoint's policy
has changed since:

It isn't for small miners (sorry little guys) although we may offer something smaller later in the year for that market with a revision of Cairnsmore2 that we have been using for algorythm development.

Conclusions: Although the hardware may prove to be an ingenious and first-rate piece of mining equipment the price is
undoubtedly going to deter thousands of miners.

[Schrankwand]

Costs can be argued about what is good or bad. I have not been following other Avalon based designs in any depth so anything I say is based on limited knowledge. I think the Burnin boards are using a USB interface and that is one we wanted to get away from. It's not great for a big design as we found out with CM1. When you get to 256 COM ports you are stuffed in Windows and maybe Linux too. The CM3 design will have a controller running Linux and miner software so doesn't need a host as such with those issues. We do have a USB interface but that is for special cases or maintainance.

USB on the surface, however they use 16 Board CAN-Bus connection to circumvent using 10.000 COM ports

The Avalon Units themselves did the same, by the way. You adressed them via Ethernet and then just let them run at the pool of your choice.

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.

At current price, yes. Avalon's original pricing was planned to allow 30 day break even at the point of sale. As a business, I think 60-90 days estimated break even are more cost conservative.

We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.

If you are trying to do that, I guess you are creating your own chips. That is going to work out, I think.

I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.

Nah, its probably worse than that. They probably messed up a lot of things early on and manufactured and sold like crazy, built boards and cases before testing their prototypes. Backfired a lot, as we all saw

[yohan]

Costs can be argued about what is good or bad. I have not been following other Avalon based designs in any depth so anything I say is based on limited knowledge. I think the Burnin boards are using a USB interface and that is one we wanted to get away from. It's not great for a big design as we found out with CM1. When you get to 256 COM ports you are stuffed in Windows and maybe Linux too. The CM3 design will have a controller running Linux and miner software so doesn't need a host as such with those issues. We do have a USB interface but that is for special cases or maintainance.

USB on the surface, however they use 16 Board CAN-Bus connection to circumvent using 10.000 COM ports

The Avalon Units themselves did the same, by the way. You adressed them via Ethernet and then just let them run at the pool of your choice.

I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.

At current price, yes. Avalon's original pricing was planned to allow 30 day break even at the point of sale. As a business, I think 60-90 days estimated break even are more cost conservative.

We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.

If you are trying to do that, I guess you are creating your own chips. That is going to work out, I think.

I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.

Nah, its probably worse than that. They probably messed up a lot of things early on and manufactured and sold like crazy, built boards and cases before testing their prototypes. Backfired a lot, as we all saw

BFL do kind of have a desperate look these days. Look's like dutch auction time to me.

[tigerbit]

BFL do kind of have a desperate look these days. Look's like dutch auction time to me.

Ha ha.  Not tempted to cash in on that desperation?   No chip orders in the pipeline for yohan? 

When can we expect to learn that CM5 is based on BFL ASICs? 

In the now trademarked "just two more weeks"?   

[Milan77]

While you are arguing about who's will be bigger I am considering this as a possible investment.
Specially FPGA one.

[yohan]

BFL do kind of have a desperate look these days. Look's like dutch auction time to me.

Ha ha.  Not tempted to cash in on that desperation?   No chip orders in the pipeline for yohan? 

When can we expect to learn that CM5 is based on BFL ASICs? 

In the now trademarked "just two more weeks"?   

They are not desperate enough yet. We have different things in mind for CM5 and CM6 and more on that when we are ready. They might make the CM7 slot but there is serious competition for that position.

[Clearfly]

Sorry but i think you've just priced yourself out of the market.

I pre-ordered in march from BFL @ ~ $25/GH
Even now their 500GH Minirig is @ ~ $50/GH

KNCMiner's Jupiter 350GH works out @ ~ $20/GH

You're essentially offering PCB design service and using Avalon Chips for ~ $125/GH

I was holding out to invest in CM3/4 but your current pricing model is way out.

[KS]

Sorry but i think you've just priced yourself out of the market.

I pre-ordered in march from BFL @ ~ $25/GH
Even now their 500GH Minirig is @ ~ $50/GH

KNCMiner's Jupiter 350GH works out @ ~ $20/GH

You're essentially offering PCB design service and using Avalon Chips for ~ $125/GH

I was holding out to invest in CM3/4 but your current pricing model is way out.

...but which one has an August 2013 delivery date?

[yohan]

Sorry but i think you've just priced yourself out of the market.

I pre-ordered in march from BFL @ ~ $25/GH
Even now their 500GH Minirig is @ ~ $50/GH

KNCMiner's Jupiter 350GH works out @ ~ $20/GH

You're essentially offering PCB design service and using Avalon Chips for ~ $125/GH

I was holding out to invest in CM3/4 but your current pricing model is way out.

...but which one has an August 2013 delivery date?

Exactly CM4 will be there August.

[crazyearner]

Hello again Yohan. I would like if poss if you can answer some questions in pm as I am almost ready to get an order together however I have a few private questions. At this time that the best way. As I have emailed yet to receive response? And also about to pm you with some private questions.

[Clearfly]

Sorry but i think you've just priced yourself out of the market.

I pre-ordered in march from BFL @ ~ $25/GH
Even now their 500GH Minirig is @ ~ $50/GH

KNCMiner's Jupiter 350GH works out @ ~ $20/GH

You're essentially offering PCB design service and using Avalon Chips for ~ $125/GH

I was holding out to invest in CM3/4 but your current pricing model is way out.

...but which one has an August 2013 delivery date?

Exactly CM4 will be there August.

So, the ROI on CM4 is still at least 5-6 months before you start to see a profit.
My BFL order will be with me August/September and making profit in less than 1 month.
If KNC deliver in September/October they will be profitable within 6-8 weeks (still some 2-3 months before the CM4 turns a profit)

Whilst i believe enterpoint have the competency to pull it off anything above $70-75/GH makes zero economic sense just for the privelage of having the gear sooner. (very same reason i won't invest in Erupter blades)

[yohan]

Hello again Yohan. I would like if poss if you can answer some questions in pm as I am almost ready to get an order together however I have a few private questions. At this time that the best way. As I have emailed yet to receive response? And also about to pm you with some private questions.

Email is usually the fastest as I don't sit all the time looking at the forum.

[KS]

Sorry but i think you've just priced yourself out of the market.

I pre-ordered in march from BFL @ ~ $25/GH
Even now their 500GH Minirig is @ ~ $50/GH

KNCMiner's Jupiter 350GH works out @ ~ $20/GH

You're essentially offering PCB design service and using Avalon Chips for ~ $125/GH

I was holding out to invest in CM3/4 but your current pricing model is way out.

...but which one has an August 2013 delivery date?

Exactly CM4 will be there August.

So, the ROI on CM4 is still at least 5-6 months before you start to see a profit.
My BFL order will be with me August/September and making profit in less than 1 month.
If KNC deliver in September/October they will be profitable within 6-8 weeks (still some 2-3 months before the CM4 turns a profit)

Whilst i believe enterpoint have the competency to pull it off anything above $70-75/GH makes zero economic sense just for the privelage of having the gear sooner. (very same reason i won't invest in Erupter blades)

I think you will be disappointed by both BFL and KNCMINER. I can't say whether BFL will deliver YOUR miner then, but I can very much guarantee that the KNCMINER miners will not ROI in the timeframe you stated. Difficulty looks likely to go up another 10 or 15x (15x would coincide with the KNCMINER introduction).

[crazyearner]

Sorry but i think you've just priced yourself out of the market.

I pre-ordered in march from BFL @ ~ $25/GH
Even now their 500GH Minirig is @ ~ $50/GH

KNCMiner's Jupiter 350GH works out @ ~ $20/GH

You're essentially offering PCB design service and using Avalon Chips for ~ $125/GH

I was holding out to invest in CM3/4 but your current pricing model is way out.

...but which one has an August 2013 delivery date?

Exactly CM4 will be there August.

So, the ROI on CM4 is still at least 5-6 months before you start to see a profit.
My BFL order will be with me August/September and making profit in less than 1 month.
If KNC deliver in September/October they will be profitable within 6-8 weeks (still some 2-3 months before the CM4 turns a profit)

Whilst i believe enterpoint have the competency to pull it off anything above $70-75/GH makes zero economic sense just for the privelage of having the gear sooner. (very same reason i won't invest in Erupter blades)

I think you will be disappointed by both BFL and KNCMINER. I can't say whether BFL will deliver YOUR miner then, but I can very much guarantee that the KNCMINER miners will not ROI in the timeframe you stated. Difficulty looks likely to go up another 10 or 15x (15x would coincide with the KNCMINER introduction).

I couldn't care for BFL or KNC miner. BFL let many people down including me I placed orders 3 times each of cancelled and got my money back. And now when trying to speak to their customer services using different email or old emails they are non responsive and also KNC Miner they have not been around for almost 2 weeks and someone posted details that maybe looking to be yet another scam.

Am happy that Enterpoint are doing what they are doing and I am looking forward to their updates in next few days. I will wait for yohan to update than to spoil the surprise

[yohan]

What should be the final CAD image below for cairnsmore3. We have a test module being built up this week to allow us to test the Avalon chips before we press the button on manufacturing the Cairnsmore3 prototypes.

[jlsminingcorp]

What should be the final CAD image below for cairnsmore3. We have a test module being built up this week to allow us to test the Avalon chips before we press the button on manufacturing the Cairnsmore3 prototypes.

Wow, it's beautiful. Congratulations guys!

[yohan]

We have had a lot of enquiries about building these systems up piecemeal so here is something of an initial price list.



Where Avalon chips are supplied by customer to us there will be a discount of £8 per chip applied.

We are also looking at a discount structure for individual boards.

[QuiveringGibbage]

Hi,

CM3 Board = USD$3800

This price is BYO Avalon chips? or Chips included?

And this can hash on it's own (apart from PSU and Internet) and does not require additional items?

Thanks,
QG

[yohan]

Hi,

CM3 Board = USD$3800

This price is BYO Avalon chips? or Chips included?

And this can hash on it's own (apart from PSU and Internet) and does not require additional items?

Thanks,
QG

The CM3 will need a Controller fitted (DIMM socket - master or slave parts as appropriate) as well as 12V, 3.3V and 5V applied. Internet can plug in at Ethernet.

The complete price does include if we supply the Avalon chip. However we only have a very limited supply so it really needs customer supply in the short term unless we are able to buy any from people that have them. That is partly why CM4 is launching at the same time as we have a better chip supply for it.  

[yohan]

Hi,

CM3 Board = USD$3800

This price is BYO Avalon chips? or Chips included?

And this can hash on it's own (apart from PSU and Internet) and does not require additional items?

Thanks,
QG

Firstly as you can see on the price list CM3 is not USD 3,800.00 but rather USD 38,400.00.

Secondly...

This price is BYO Avalon chips? or Chips included?

If you provide you own Avalon chips to Enterpoint you get £8 discount for every chip.


@yohan
           Do the prices include VAT?

There are rack prices and individual board prices. We annoucnced initially a whole rack price with 8 CM3s. Each CM3 has 144 Avalon chips which if Avalon datasheet is correct gives 40,608 MH/s per board. Until we have a full rack system up and running we won't have exact performance numbers.

Prices don't include VAT if that applies. VAT usually only applies to EU customers.

[crazyearner]

Afternoon yohan Can you tell me what the difference is for the CM 3 and CM4 boards please as theirs no price difference.

Q1  can you tell me what PSU is used for the £150 price  is this for an atx 80+ 1200w PSU?

Q2  can you tell me of what items I will need in order of have a system up and running. I am assuming that 1x Rack at 3k is the actual racks with the chips on that is the module that goes into the rack to mine with etc?

Q3 Can you tell me if I need both sub rack and full-rack to begin with?

Is the full rack to add 9 or more modules to it and the sub-rack an extinction of this to add even more later on details please as am confused  ?

Can you maybe brake down each item of what each one does and compares ie like CM 3 CM4

Sorry for all the questions the details are confusing to me.

[pitan]

So nice that whatever questions I want to ask has been asked!
Thanks everyone 

[SnitraM]

We have had a lot of enquiries about building these systems up piecemeal so here is something of an initial price list.

http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/gm.jpg

Where Avalon chips are supplied by customer to us there will be a discount of £8 per chip applied.

We are also looking at a discount structure for individual boards.

Errhm... I'm having trouble understanding what I need. If I'd want to put together the smallest/cheapest
CM4-miner, what exactly would I need to order?

CM4 board obviously.
Master controller, I think.
Full rack , I think.
How many ATX power supplies and power distribution panels?

Then if I'd like to expand with one more CM4 board:
CM4 board (obviously)
Controller pass through and master-slave ribbon cable, I think.
How many ATX power supplies and power distribution panels?

Then how many times can I add one CM4 board until the rack is full?

How much power will one system with one CM4 board use?

[spiccioli]

So nice that whatever questions I want to ask has been asked!
Thanks everyone 

BTW,

what kind of chip is used on a CM4?

spiccioli

[Bicknellski]

Crainsmore1 [ 800 MH/s ] expensive as well. For 10BTC I can get 5 block erupters [ 5x330=1650 MH/s ]

Correct me if I am wrong (it's late) but your block erupters are costing 10 BTC ~= £653 for 1.65GH/s. = £395 per GH/s. How is that better than £80 per GH/s for a major piece of engineering?

We are not aiming to be the cheapest with this equipment as some of the supposed maybe competative offerings are way too cheap to be viable as professionally engineered and manufactured products. A rig on this scale needs a lot more engineering than a lash up design of a few chips. That said we think it is good value for this sort of rig. There are not many offerings at the 0.3-0.5 TH/s size range. This is technology that will build 100Th/s rigs and not just hang out of a laptop USB port.

+1 HERE HERE!

Can we direct ship you 10K in chips for discount runs?

[spiccioli]

BTW, ATX power supply 80A 

Thats 17 kW using 220V

Does it really use so much power for 300 GH/s ?

spiccioli

[Lethos]

Definitely good to see you Yohan come forward with this.

I'll look forward to see all your variants you end up doing (smaller ones?).
Then I'll probably become a repeat customer (still use 2 CM1's).

[yohan]

We have had a lot of enquiries about building these systems up piecemeal so here is something of an initial price list.



Where Avalon chips are supplied by customer to us there will be a discount of £8 per chip applied.

We are also looking at a discount structure for individual boards.

Errhm... I'm having trouble understanding what I need. If I'd want to put together the smallest/cheapest
CM4-miner, what exactly would I need to order?

CM4 board obviously.
Master controller, I think.
Full rack , I think.
How many ATX power supplies and power distribution panels?

Then if I'd like to expand with one more CM4 board:
CM4 board (obviously)
Controller pass through and master-slave ribbon cable, I think.
How many ATX power supplies and power distribution panels?

Then how many times can I add one CM4 board until the rack is full?

How much power will one system with one CM4 board use?

There are a few optional items that we have not costed as yet the main ones being add-on fans for single boards, water cooling options, small cases etc.

The slave Controller will have a small FPGA mainly used as buffering. The initial master controller will have a bought in ARM A9 module paired with a FPGA for buffering and functional acceleration. It is possible poth CM3/4 could be used as USB style boards if Controller firmware is suitable. We won't promise that as an initial function but it is on our list of features we want.

The number of CM4s in a rack is primarily set by the height of the Controller that sits in a vertical DIMM socket and the cooling solution. At the moment we are targeting 8 boards in a rack but 9 or 10 might be possible. More details on that as we get the design pulled together. The initial cooling design will use the same heatsinks found on CM1 but water cooling is the target for high density racks later on.

The connection of boards is a bit like what we did on CM1 except we have a lot more wires to play with and we can run LVDS as well. The daisy chain will really only be limited by the Controller processing power and as yet we don't have good enough numbers other than we think we are ok for 8 boards. Because the controller can be changed we have got a planned "upgrade" path where higher performance controllers could be designed and fitted later if needed. Obviously we could also use more master controllers as well if needed in a rack.

Ok minimum startup could be using a 1 x CM4 outside a rack like CM1. We might be even able to stack the same way. That is TBC. You will need a Controller and power supply. Almost certainly an ATX PSU as inital power budget per card is 60A at 12V. That may vary with the performance delivered so may be a little less or a little more. These numbers are interpolations from Cairnsmore2 testing. CM4 will have its 12V segmented into 2 or 3 sections to help with how PSU get wired up to the boards and shared between boards.

We are in negotiation for PSU supply but the option will be there for customers to reuse their own or buy locally to keep freight cost down. We may end up with a higher current PSU and less of them in a rack but that element is still in design so not finally fixed.

We will talk a bit more about the detail of CM4 nearer the release. The main thing is that we will guarantee the price per GH/s Bitcoin hashing delivered. That gives us some room to vary how we implement that hashing power. We know everyone wants to know the detail but we are still sorting out a number of things commercially and design wise so please bear with us on the CM4. CM3 is much more straight forward but we still have a little development there to get it all going. It obviously will only do Bitcoin mining and that is both a plus and a negative and hence a reason for doing CM4. Going beyond all of these we hope to expand what we do in these systems with CM5 and CM6 and so on but that is for after August.

[Gomeler]

Happy to see there will be a minimal build option @ ~$5200 for 1 CM3 board and 1 controller. Will wait for more details.

[joeventura]

If the CM4 uses Avalon chips, counting the chips on the drawing I see 40Gh on the board.

Just for the board it is $4800 US which is $120 per GH not including other boards, fans, controllers etc.

So easily $130 per GH?

Is that a fair assessment?

[yohan]

If the CM4 uses Avalon chips, counting the chips on the drawing I see 40Gh on the board.

Just for the board it is $4800 US which is $120 per GH not including other boards, fans, controllers etc.

So easily $130 per GH?

Is that a fair assessment?

That is a close enough number.

[joeventura]

If the CM4 uses Avalon chips, counting the chips on the drawing I see 40Gh on the board.

Just for the board it is $4800 US which is $120 per GH not including other boards, fans, controllers etc.

So easily $130 per GH?

Is that a fair assessment?

That is a close enough number.

Ok I admire your honesty.

You also realize that apart from the USB Block Erupter things, your cost per GH is the highest of anyone per GH by a factor of more than double (closer to triple)?

BFL is $45 to $55 a GH
Terrahash is $50 to $55
KNC Miner is $20 to $35

So how do you expect to be successful?

[Schrankwand]

If the CM4 uses Avalon chips, counting the chips on the drawing I see 40Gh on the board.

Just for the board it is $4800 US which is $120 per GH not including other boards, fans, controllers etc.

So easily $130 per GH?

Is that a fair assessment?

That is a close enough number.

Ok I admire your honesty.

You also realize that apart from the USB Block Erupter things, your cost per GH is the highest of anyone per GH by a factor of more than double (closer to triple)?

BFL is $45 to $55 a GH
Terrahash is $50 to $55
KNC Miner is $20 to $35

So how do you expect to be successful?

Incompetency of competition, I recon.

[joeventura]

If the CM4 uses Avalon chips, counting the chips on the drawing I see 40Gh on the board.

Just for the board it is $4800 US which is $120 per GH not including other boards, fans, controllers etc.

So easily $130 per GH?

Is that a fair assessment?

That is a close enough number.

Ok I admire your honesty.

You also realize that apart from the USB Block Erupter things, your cost per GH is the highest of anyone per GH by a factor of more than double (closer to triple)?

BFL is $45 to $55 a GH
Terrahash is $50 to $55
KNC Miner is $20 to $35

So how do you expect to be successful?

Incompetency of competition, I recon.

He is up against the same challenges, all he has is a design, Without $360k worth of chips on order 2 months ago, this has no chance of getting anywhere.   You can't charge 250% more that the competition no matter what, you may be able to charge 150-200% if you could ship today

[SnitraM]

You also realize that apart from the USB Block Erupter things, your cost per GH is the highest of anyone per GH by a factor of more than double (closer to triple)?

BFL is $45 to $55 a GH
Terrahash is $50 to $55
KNC Miner is $20 to $35

So how do you expect to be successful?

I suppose 1 H/s in August is worth 2-3 1 H/s in December... (Or March... Or whenever...)

[yohan]

If the CM4 uses Avalon chips, counting the chips on the drawing I see 40Gh on the board.

Just for the board it is $4800 US which is $120 per GH not including other boards, fans, controllers etc.

So easily $130 per GH?

Is that a fair assessment?

That is a close enough number.

Ok I admire your honesty.

You also realize that apart from the USB Block Erupter things, your cost per GH is the highest of anyone per GH by a factor of more than double (closer to triple)?

BFL is $45 to $55 a GH
Terrahash is $50 to $55
KNC Miner is $20 to $35

So how do you expect to be successful?

The short answer is we don't have to be successful in selling kit as such our own mining activities with these products will make us much more than making and selling hardware. Bitcoin is also not our main business so also a reason not to offer silly prices. No point doing it if we don't make money or worse make a loss. Kit like this does cost more to make than simple small boards and you have the choice to go with what you think works best. What we are doing is simply opening what we are doing it up to other people.

You might disagree but there trends from both Avalon and BFL towards dearer hardware I might suggest that they don't make money making the hardware at the what I will call the silly prices they have been offering. On the surface they are both starting to look more like semiconductor manufacturers than equipment producers. The newer entrants to the market I might suggest that they have not costed things properly and will end up making a loss and ultimate will probably go out of business. It is easy to get caught in the glitz of Bitcoin and not base what you are doing as a business on hard logic and analysis.

You might also ask why Avalon is supposedly mining with equipment before shipping. I would suggest that is so they actual make money and not lose money on equipment sales. Same comment has been made about BFL in the past.

[joeventura]

Well I can't argue with anything you said and it makes sense.

I wish you the best of luck!

[crazyearner]

Hello yohan. I have sent in an email for order details however un answered sent this morning to both sales and Goliath email and no response form any of them? I know you might have a lot to get through with your projects but just making sure if you have received them?


Look at it this way people for the ones moaning about the price this is around the same as BFL big unit. People saying 225% to 300% more expensive? How is that when 40GH is almost the same price £3,000 for the 63 GH unit plus you get the option to expand on a much larger scale.. First batch of Avalon 1200 or so 2nd batch 1499 batch 3 was 75BTC  around 7 or 8,000 USD if you want to put it into fiat currencies. Ask yourself this? Have they been making this hardware in the past more than likely, have they any proof of making past hardware and providing equipment like enterpoint? Maybe. Does Enterpoint make lies or make delays or ignore your phone calls NO. At least Enterpoint has a nice reception lay who greets you with a warm welcoming introduction asks you what you would like and puts you through to the right person to speak to. I have tried to contact BFL a number of times yes they have the same sort of greeting but they also LIE to their customers. Avalon I never seem to get through to anyone unless am phoning the wrong numbers for them.

BFL have had delay after delay and yes they are starting to ship. The question is tho how long would you be waiting now if you placed an order for a unit 6 to 8 months maybe longer maybe shorter if they get through their 10s of thousands of orders. Would you even get your money back put into their hardware? I like many have had orders with BFL and canceled not to mention all the other scam threads that they have took peoples BTC and ran off with their hard earned cash.

Avalon. They where not trusted in the beginning, however they provided the tech at an affordable price but the problem is, if something goes wrong your Avalon it is a long way to ship back to them and get your equipment fixed if something goes wrong.

The only ones sending stuff out in the past have been Enterpoint, BFL  and a few smaller company's that produced FPGA and to this day still sell FPGA. Yes they are new company's popping up all the time but do they have anything to back their company up well only faith and trust in people and taking a much bigger risk.

Yes their is also a new company knc miner. They are offering big units like Enterpoint their price $ 6,995.00 Then comes shipping then comes import tax and customs plus a big amount of risk, As to most of the above will have the same. I do have some faith in KNC however am very skeptical like many others. I didn't trust Avalon at first and waited for batch 2 to come along. I put orders in for BFL but due to so many problems past and present I  ended up canceling orders and going with Avalon that am still waiting on unit..

Has Enterpoint got a 2 year wasting list NO. Will you make your money back? More than likely if you do research and don't want to make an instant return.

Look at it as a long term and stop thinking GET RICH QUICK TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME A TUN BACK its not gonna happen unless maybe you got in early with Avalon or Bitcoin at the beginning. Some early orders of Avalon yes I will admit they are happy making a bucket of money as they got in early and now setting the grounds for high Diff and same with BFL now bringing out units.

Has Avalon got a 2 year wasting list. NO But look at batch 3 orders they increased the price right up. You could of waited and had placed an order with Enterpoint and you would get your equipment as Batch 3 only just starts to ship out and more than likely have a unit before you get your Batch 3. I know how much everyone loves Avalon for what they have done getting Asic out their in the world before any other company got theirs out and that sure was a team effort to do such amazing things, even I love them to bits. The other questions is tho, are Avalon now going to do a Batch #4 is another question asked and said they where going to do a 4th batch however in the 2013 Bitcoin conference said that this is placed on hold.

How many of you have been looking for a company who is actually taking orders? That is legit and not a scam? Am sure 70% or more would answer yes. How many of you have placed orders for the USB miners that in the long run after a years worth of mining might able to brake even on? Think of how much you just spent on your 10 or more USB miners and think of how much more power you could of got building a rig up bit by bit from Enterpoint and paying for it out of the revenue made from the machine..

Myself like many others have projects and goals for in the distant future and want to provide a business that is built around Bitcoin not just as a miner but to actually provide services to the public with a wide range of different things. Mining is just a hobby for me and will be something to start far grater and bigger projects that will make BTC strong in the future. People need to stop thinking about Bitcoin mining alone and look out side the box at other things you can do with Bitcoin and actually see how big and the potential it has to offer.

I have seen what it has to offer on a larger scale. Mining for me is just a starting point and an interesting hobby to have fun with and at the same time start a business up. Not to have to go to a Bank and ask them for a business loan that has to be paid back. At least with mining you can actually start somewhere and build up on it and make progress. Mining is not for everyone. Even for me at fist it was not for me then I  done a lot more research into it started mining and getting gpus and I got fed up of that not to mention the cost of energy, multi cards, noise, heat and other factors of gpu mining.

With all that has gone on Enterpoint is still a good deal, It is how you look at it and research things before thinking their a total rip off. DO some research into how much others cost and see how many of them have been a scam and how much their now out of pocket.

BFL? Yes their cheap to get started however look at all the problems they currently have would you really risk your BTC or USD with them?

Avalon? Are they going to do any more batches and bring out bigger and faster equipment? Maybe who knows more than likely watch their videos

KNC? Will they actually deliver on time and have units for people. I honestly do not know. However if they do I will look at maybe ordering once they have got units out their to their customers and start seeing tracking numbers provided and in hand videos from customers.

I know am rambling on here, however am sure some will agree some will disagree. I am just grateful of Enterpoint actually going into the time and effort of actually coming up with this tech and well theirs going to be a few surprises for people that's all am saying and will leave our amazing Yohan and their development team to post the updates of what is about to come in the distant future. I know others reading what am saying here will know exactly what am referring to.

I would like to say a big THANK YOU to all the people who put their effort into making this technology possible to bring out to the market,  Avalon, Enterpoint, FPGA company's and Maybe BFL if they can get their act together. And all this wouldn't be possible without their commitment and programming and hardware knowledge.

[joeventura]

I don't know where you learned math, but $4800 USD is twice as much as $2400 US

To put it another way, $4800 for 40GH is more than $2400 for 50GH (Price of BFL product)

And I will challenge you that a $4800 order for this 40GH device would be received at the same time as a 50GH device ordered from BFL.
September or October.

Unless you know something that isn't being said.

[crazyearner]

I don't know where you learned math, but $4800 USD is twice as much as $2400 US

To put it another way, $4800 for 40GH is more than $2400 for 50GH (Price of BFL product)

And I will challenge you that a $4800 order for this 40GH device would be received at the same time as a 50GH device ordered from BFL.
September or October.

Unless you know something that isn't being said.

You might want to read I put GBP pound sterling not US Dollar 3k GBP is about double prices depending on market exchange

BFL = $2,499.00 then you need their shipping on top looking around $3,150 depending on what shipping you select and where you are.

And if you actually read Enterpoint is making shipment in Aug not SEP/Oct so it would beat BFL. GO look at BFL then and wait over a year.  BFL have over 20,000 or more pre orders and still taking orders in. If you think you know so much then game on. Read page 1 of this threa.

Orders for August delivery will need to be placed rapidly to guarantee delivery dates.

Meaning ordering now is securing order and shipment for Aug not a estimated date or no idea with BFL

BFL around $3150
Enterpoint  $6614
So 3104 difference between the 2 maybe 3k difference  so 200% or their about if you are thinking in terms of fiat currencies. However its up to the buyer what to buy when to by and who from. I know I wouldn't place an order with BFL I had 3 orders with them canceled each one of them because they never shipped out and waiting over a year. And theirs a lot more in the q than you think. 20 to 30k people or more and they only sent out maybe 15  to 20 units at most. And a lot of people have done the same iver canceld their BFL order or sold it on.

[joeventura]

Its all about timing.

200% is not worth it unless you can deliver in July

[crazyearner]

Its all about timing.

200% is not worth it unless you can deliver in July

Only people who are so far ding that is Avalon for batch 2 orders that are still been processed and shipped out then batch 3 and in that time BFL if they send any more units out. And I do not expect any BFL orders to be done in big amounts any time soon.

[spiccioli]

Yohan,

is bitcoin an option for paying CM3/4 boards?

spiccioli

[yohan]

Yohan,

is bitcoin an option for paying CM3/4 boards?

spiccioli

Yes we are taking Bitcoins.

[yohan]

Guys we are going to upset a few of you that are keen to go forward with CM3/4 and I apologise on behalf of Enterpoint for that.

We have temporarily lost one of our key Bitcoin team members to illness and this is very likely to impact our timescales. As a result we are not going to progress orders until we have a clearer view of the impact. This won't affect our ability to manufacture directly but there may be delays due to designs being later than planned and that is of course important to you guys. Our main problem area is the Controller software and to a small extent FPGA development as it is tied to when aspects of the software are ready. We do have a backup plan but that doesn't give all the hosting features directly and we feel that is a major loss to the design spec. We are also going to look for external resource to solve the software issue but dropping someone into the hot seat doesn't always work.

It is going to take us a few days before we have a clear view on all of this so please bear with us whilst we sort it out.

[Lethos]

Lost? my condolences to the team and his/her family.

[jlsminingcorp]

Thanks for being up front about this yohan. Good luck finding a solution.

[dogie]

Lost? my condolences to the team and his/her family.

Not unless he's a fucking zombie

We have temporarily lost one of our key Bitcoin team members to illness

[Lethos]

Lost? my condolences to the team and his/her family.

Not unless he's a fucking zombie

We have temporarily lost one of our key Bitcoin team members to illness

I swear that wasn't there when I posted. It's clearly not a good idea to post anything before I've had my first cup of tea.

[jlsminingcorp]

I personally wouldn't have any ethical problems with ASIC manufacturers raising the dead to move their projects along. There must be some parts of the process where a zombie army would come in useful. Zombie labour would be cheap (chuck them a bit of raw meat every now and again) and I don't think they need to sleep, so you could work them 24/7. Would a zombie have the nouse for software development?

[Schrankwand]

You might disagree but there trends from both Avalon and BFL towards dearer hardware I might suggest that they don't make money making the hardware at the what I will call the silly prices they have been offering. On the surface they are both starting to look more like semiconductor manufacturers than equipment producers. The newer entrants to the market I might suggest that they have not costed things properly and will end up making a loss and ultimate will probably go out of business. It is easy to get caught in the glitz of Bitcoin and not base what you are doing as a business on hard logic and analysis.

Avalon has been in the red with batch 1, since batch 1 had to cover development costs.

As you will see also, most problems with Avalon units did not stem from the chips, but USB controllers, Power supplies and so on. So I guess you are right there.

I have, however talked with a few people on PCB and whether or not the prices by some manufacturers are alright. I was astounded to hear that for example the 100€ price tag for a 20 chip Avalon design without FPGA might be actually covering a 3x markup.

A 3 times markup should be a profitable business venture, if you ask me?!

[yohan]

Test board for Avalon chips.

[Foofighter]

n1, are there also some hashing results?

[yohan]

n1, are there also some hashing results?

No not yet. This board is really about us testing out communications and results reporting. Also allows us to check out our schematic and pcb symbols and wire up before we build the expensive board. Performance I would expect as the data sheet.

[crazyearner]

n1, are there also some hashing results?

No not yet. This board is really about us testing out communications and results reporting. Also allows us to check out our schematic and pcb symbols and wire up before we build the expensive board. Performance I would expect as the data sheet.

Do you have any updates regarding your ill member of staff have you found a solution to this delay yet or still trying to find a solution?

[yohan]

n1, are there also some hashing results?

No not yet. This board is really about us testing out communications and results reporting. Also allows us to check out our schematic and pcb symbols and wire up before we build the expensive board. Performance I would expect as the data sheet.

Do you have any updates regarding your ill member of staff have you found a solution to this delay yet or still trying to find a solution?

We are still working on a solution.

[yohan]

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

[jlsminingcorp]

That's a real shame, but seems to make sense in the current crazy ASIC environment. There's no sense in being late to the party if some of the other ASIC offers materialise at the end of the summer. Would be great to see bitfury ASICs on a CMx board at some point. Also, your litecoin mining hint for CM4 was cruelly inticing . I'd love to see a scrypt miner from you guys if you can do it!!

[yohan]

That's a real shame, but seems to make sense in the current crazy ASIC environment. There's no sense in being late to the party if some of the other ASIC offers materialise at the end of the summer. Would be great to see bitfury ASICs on a CMx board at some point. Also, your litecoin mining hint for CM4 was cruelly inticing . I'd love to see a scrypt miner from you guys if you can do it!!

If we were reasonably ready on a Litecoin miner IP design we would probably have carried on. CM4 still makes sense for that market but to be honest being short on people we had to let something go in the short term. Hopefully we can come back to this when we are less stretched. For the shorter term we will continue with the plan to manufacture a memory add-on for CM1. That doesn't mean we will have time to do much on Litecoin IP in Q3 but it will hopefully enable anyone that does want to have a go at a Litecoin design. Depending on what else is happening we will try and look at Litecoin proper in Q4.

As to other technologies we are open to developing other members of this family based on whatever technology is available and appears to be viable as a project. Once we have the Controller module sorted out with Cairnsmore3 most of that work will be reusable into any new board designs. There are going to be several months of instability in the ASIC marketplace and I would not be surprised if one, or more, of the companies offering solutions go out of business or withdraw from producing Bitcoin kit. During this period our main focus will be on our mainstream products and Bitcoin/Litecoin products will simply carry on in the background whilst the market sorts itself out.

[Schrankwand]

As to other technologies we are open to developing other members of this family based on whatever technology is available and appears to be viable as a project. Once we have the Controller module sorted out with Cairnsmore3 most of that work will be reusable into any new board designs. There are going to be several months of instability in the ASIC marketplace and I would not be surprised if one, or more, of the companies offering solutions go out of business or withdraw from producing Bitcoin kit. During this period our main focus will be on our mainstream products and Bitcoin/Litecoin products will simply carry on in the background whilst the marker sorts itself out.

The first one was already crushed, bASIC. Others have stopped in their tracks before even starting.


I guess this has already happened, we might be a step further already.

However with Mtgox getting ready for LTC, a small scale or larger scale LTC mining solution would be probably the most interesting at the momoment. From what I have looked at technically, it seems that even with larger memory and a good solving strategy litecoin will be far more resistant to FPGAs and ASICs than SHA. This is a good thing insofar as the explosion in hash rate will be more reasonable and less exponential than what happens to BTC right now.

[mazedk]

That's a real shame, but seems to make sense in the current crazy ASIC environment. There's no sense in being late to the party if some of the other ASIC offers materialise at the end of the summer. Would be great to see bitfury ASICs on a CMx board at some point. Also, your litecoin mining hint for CM4 was cruelly inticing . I'd love to see a scrypt miner from you guys if you can do it!!

+1 The litecoin aspect is really interesting and could be a gamechanger in that currency. I imagine that would bring more success than an bitcoin ASIC would - seeing as theres a lot of run on the marked for those units lately. But noone seem to have been going forward with a litecoin setup - not in public that is.

[crazyearner]

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

So what does this mean then for your cm3 design are you still going to continue to work the project for the 300 to 500GH rigs ? or is this also being stopped too?

[yohan]

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

So what does this mean then for your cm3 design are you still going to continue to work the project for the 300 to 500GH rigs ? or is this also being stopped too?

Our aim will be to continue with bigger rig concepts. Work on CM3 continues albeit at a slower pace and we are also looking at an alternative concept for the CM4 slot which might be quite interesting but needs much less work to complete. What we don't want to put down at the moment is anything like a fixed timescale until we are more or less ready with whatever of the concepts makes the grade.

[tigerbit]

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

So what does this mean then for your cm3 design are you still going to continue to work the project for the 300 to 500GH rigs ? or is this also being stopped too?

Our aim will be to continue with bigger rig concepts. Work on CM3 continues albeit at a slower pace and we are also looking at an alternative concept for the CM4 slot which might be quite interesting but needs much less work to complete. What we don't want to put down at the moment is anything like a fixed timescale until we are more or less ready with whatever of the concepts makes the grade.

Please say.. Bitfury's 5GHash chips. Nice evolution from the Avalon CM3.  ;-)

[crazyearner]

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

So what does this mean then for your cm3 design are you still going to continue to work the project for the 300 to 500GH rigs ? or is this also being stopped too?

Our aim will be to continue with bigger rig concepts. Work on CM3 continues albeit at a slower pace and we are also looking at an alternative concept for the CM4 slot which might be quite interesting but needs much less work to complete. What we don't want to put down at the moment is anything like a fixed timescale until we are more or less ready with whatever of the concepts makes the grade.

Are you going to be making price changes to reflect market value and also other company's tech or are you going to be sticking at 24k

[yohan]

Update

We are continuing to slip on the Cairnsmore4 design so we have decided to can the project as it is today. We have some alternative ideas that we are considering progressing but these won't happen until after August and we see what the hashing landscape looks like. Our predictions are 500TH/s at the end of August and 1000TH/s by the end of the year. Currently Bitcoin exchange rates are also going the wrong way and that is also a reason to stop the CM4 project in it's current form.

The Cairnsmore3 and general Goliath concept continue at our best pace that we can manage and once we are happy with the design we offer it to customers as a service in the same fashion as we originally stated.

We are also looking at other ASIC suppliers for future Cairnsmore boards but that will depend on a market existing for these products.

So what does this mean then for your cm3 design are you still going to continue to work the project for the 300 to 500GH rigs ? or is this also being stopped too?

Our aim will be to continue with bigger rig concepts. Work on CM3 continues albeit at a slower pace and we are also looking at an alternative concept for the CM4 slot which might be quite interesting but needs much less work to complete. What we don't want to put down at the moment is anything like a fixed timescale until we are more or less ready with whatever of the concepts makes the grade.

Are you going to be making price changes to reflect market value and also other company's tech or are you going to be sticking at 24k

Possibly we will but it is kind of academic until we have a product ready to launch. For now we will quitely continue our developments of Cairnsmore3 and the new concept of Cairnsmore4. We now won't take advance orders on these until they are actually working and proven. When we are there we will then look at the market and decide if there is viable pricing structure for us to bother with selling units or simply fed our own mining requirements.

[yohan]

Just something of a little update. Please don't email/PM asking for more details of specification and pricing as we are on shutdown until Sepember (apart from a small number of people working on CM3/CM4 designs). We also won't say any more until announced in this thread. There is also not a definate time frame for availability as this will depend in part on chip availability that is beyond our control.

There won't be pre-orders for these systems now. They will simply be offered for sale when they are more or less ready to ship.

Cairnsmore3 - We have this design now integrated with of revision1 Goliath Controller and basically debugging the design. We expect to complete that in the next couple of weeks. We will build boards with the Avalon chips we already have following that. Given recent announcements by Avalon we hope to migrate this design to their gen2 chips but we don't have enough technical data yet to say that definately will be a smooth transition.

On the subject of chips we will be offering to buy chips via known supply chains e.g. Sebastian Ju and Zefir at prices to be determined by our view of market conditions. Don't contact us, or the guys, on that directly until we make something more of a formal announcement. We will set it up with the relevant people and the offer will come from them only if they wish to participate in this.

Cairnsmore4 - As some you have already guessed we have changed the CM4 concept to being based on Bitfury chips. We plan to have first hardware on the bench next week but there will be a lot of work still to do on this. We think the design will offer between 360 and 800 GH/s per board but until we do the work that isn't definate as a spec. Time frame for availability is very much down to the next deliveries of Bitfury chips.

Outside of these products we may have something for the small setup as well but more on that later. We will start a seperate thread for that when ready.

We will continue to work with ASIC suppliers as new chips appear to provide successor products in this range.

[bit_wizard]

Epic.

[rocks]

That's a real shame, but seems to make sense in the current crazy ASIC environment. There's no sense in being late to the party if some of the other ASIC offers materialise at the end of the summer. Would be great to see bitfury ASICs on a CMx board at some point. Also, your litecoin mining hint for CM4 was cruelly inticing . I'd love to see a scrypt miner from you guys if you can do it!!

+1 The litecoin aspect is really interesting and could be a gamechanger in that currency. I imagine that would bring more success than an bitcoin ASIC would - seeing as theres a lot of run on the marked for those units lately. But noone seem to have been going forward with a litecoin setup - not in public that is.

Yohan, I agree with the comments above. It would be great to have a scrypt hashing board based on FPGAs, and I think you guys would do well here.

I see no reason why an FPGA scrypt solution couldn't be developed. I used to design FPGA applications on existing boards (~10 years ago) and a board with an FPGA and multiple memory ports to cheap DRAM dimms could be developed that would be very competitive to GPU mining.

The advantage of this is Enterpoint could offer stable supply/pricing based on commodity FPGAs, DRAM and your boards, not this insanity with unreliable ASIC vendors

The issue with bitcoin mining is the next gen ASICs make anything other than them non competitive. You have multiple vendors coming out with ~500GHash/sec chips at very attractive power profiles. You can argue if they will meet the announced time frames, but regardless that is the level of efficiency that will be reached at some point.

This is why when you first announced Goliath I asked what the hashing engine would be based on. With the new ASIC hashing engines there is little room to succeed with BTC mining unless you acquire one of these engines (from very unreliable suppliers.)

[yohan]

That's a real shame, but seems to make sense in the current crazy ASIC environment. There's no sense in being late to the party if some of the other ASIC offers materialise at the end of the summer. Would be great to see bitfury ASICs on a CMx board at some point. Also, your litecoin mining hint for CM4 was cruelly inticing . I'd love to see a scrypt miner from you guys if you can do it!!

+1 The litecoin aspect is really interesting and could be a gamechanger in that currency. I imagine that would bring more success than an bitcoin ASIC would - seeing as theres a lot of run on the marked for those units lately. But noone seem to have been going forward with a litecoin setup - not in public that is.

Yohan, I agree with the comments above. It would be great to have a scrypt hashing board based on FPGAs, and I think you guys would do well here.

I see no reason why an FPGA scrypt solution couldn't be developed. I used to design FPGA applications on existing boards (~10 years ago) and a board with an FPGA and multiple memory ports to cheap DRAM dimms could be developed that would be very competitive to GPU mining.

The advantage of this is Enterpoint could offer stable supply/pricing based on commodity FPGAs, DRAM and your boards, not this insanity with unreliable ASIC vendors

The issue with bitcoin mining is the next gen ASICs make anything other than them non competitive. You have multiple vendors coming out with ~500GHash/sec chips at very attractive power profiles. You can argue if they will meet the announced time frames, but regardless that is the level of efficiency that will be reached at some point.

This is why when you first announced Goliath I asked what the hashing engine would be based on. With the new ASIC hashing engines there is little room to succeed with BTC mining unless you acquire one of these engines (from very unreliable suppliers.)

Part of our strategy here is to be able to adapt with the fast moving market and even visually CM4 looks very much like CM3. No idea yet if CM5-10 will follow the same chip patterns but there will be similarities in their structures seen in those boards. With the controller module as a plug in can get carried over to the next design and in extreme cases you might scrap a CM3 main board and replace with say a CM5 main board reusing the Controller and saving some cost in the upgrade. We also have plans for the Controller and the second release with probably be very different from the first. At the moment this is about keep timescales and what we can actually deliver.

The 400-500 GH/s chips still have to be proven as working and actually practical to use. Currently there are more questions than answers on these but of course we will look at them when it is relevant to do so.

On Litecoin we do have a memory add-on for CM1 going into manufacture. I don't want anyone to think we have Litecoin mining now running on CM1. We don't and won't for at least some time to come give our current workload. This new module will simply be available anyone that wants to try and implement it on a CM1. On the big boards we will come back to Litecoin at some point but no promises when that might be.

[rocks]

On Litecoin we do have a memory add-on for CM1 going into manufacture. I don't want anyone to think we have Litecoin mining now running on CM1. We don't and won't for at least some time to come give our current workload. This new module will simply be available anyone that wants to try and implement it on a CM1. On the big boards we will come back to Litecoin at some point but no promises when that might be.

I _might_ be interested in one such CM1 board with memory add-ons in order to try and hack a solution together in my spare time (which is very little these days between work and babies, and it is doubtful I would have enough time). Couple questions:

1) Have you done any sizing to estimate/optimize both the amount of memory and # of memory ports that would be optimal for scrypt and CM1? Otherwise the board configuration is a stab in the dark.

2) Would such a board come with the necessary IP blocks needed to interface with the add-on memory ports during Verilog development? This would make development easier and is usually provided with development boards.

3) If someone did successfully develop a scrypt miner, would you offer any business terms to make it available for others?

[hf_developer]

There are Litecoin ASICs already available on the market, no need to develop with FPGAs. They're called GPUs. Contains up to 1600 processors each, every processor has its own memory. Hashrates up to 800kh/s, you will never get a performance like that with FPGAs. Scrypt is not a question of how much memory you have, but more on how much memory portions you can access independently in parallel. Already available scrypt implementations on FPGAs have shown that hash rates of 4 kh/s per core can be achieved, 6-8 fitting into one FPGA, consuming 30W. Even if you increase throughput by factor 5 (....this will not happen), it can't compete GPUs.

[rocks]

There are Litecoin ASICs already available on the market, no need to develop with FPGAs. They're called GPUs. Contains up to 1600 processors each, every processor has its own memory. Hashrates up to 800kh/s, you will never get a performance like that with FPGAs. Scrypt is not a question of how much memory you have, but more on how much memory portions you can access independently in parallel. Already available scrypt implementations on FPGAs have shown that hash rates of 4 kh/s per core can be achieved, 6-8 fitting into one FPGA, consuming 30W. Even if you increase throughput by factor 5 (....this will not happen), it can't compete GPUs.

OK, if people that have already looked at this think the above is best you can get with FPGAs for scrypt, then there is no need to pursue it. Do you have any links pointing to the above results / findings for FPGA development?

However I find this result surprising and am not sure that I fully believe it. For SHA256 bitcion hashing, FPGAs were competitive with with 1600 core GPUs on a Watt/MHash ratio and close enough on a $/MHash ratio. This is why many miners converted from 1600 core GPUs to FPGA clusters in 2012. Remember the initial FPGA designs only offered <5Mhash per FPGA, but motivated people later brought that up to 200MHash per FPGA.

Fully agree that the # of memory ports that can be independently accessed in parallel is most important for an FPGA implementation. I suspect the most important aspect to a scrypt FPGA implementation is to balance the # of computational cores in the FPGA to the memory access attributes, not sure how that was done to yield the above results. GPUs offer extremely high memory bandwidth to service the large # of independent cores, which yes might give them the edge...

[hf_developer]

Yes, there was a significant increase of hash rate for FPGAs in SHA256, but this is an effect of the possibility to fully unroll the SHA256 core. It then goes one hash per clock. MHz = MHash/s

This is algorithmically impossible for scrypt as this algorithm was specially designed to be resistant against that. In most linear algorithms you have two possibilities: Get a speed up with the need of more ressources, or save ressources but achieve a lower computation rate. If one side decreases, the other one increases and vice versa. Not so for scrypt. Both sides increase nearly equally.

Here you can see a scrypt demonstration on FPGA with hashrates ~ 2kh/s. (You need to be very experienced to make it twice that speed!):

https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner

[rocks]

Yes, there was a significant increase of hash rate for FPGAs in SHA256, but this is an effect of the possibility to fully unroll the SHA256 core. It then goes one hash per clock. MHz = MHash/s

This is algorithmically impossible for scrypt as this algorithm was specially designed to be resistant against that. In most linear algorithms you have two possibilities: Get a speed up with the need of more ressources, or save ressources but achieve a lower computation rate. If one side decreases, the other one increases and vice versa. Not so for scrypt. Both sides increase nearly equally.

Here you can see a scrypt demonstration on FPGA with hashrates ~ 2kh/s. (You need to be very experienced to make it twice that speed!):

https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner

Thank you hf_developer, this was very helpful. I was not aware of this effort and look forward to reading and understanding the code better.

The design only used the on-chip FPGA RAM of an LX150, which is fairly limited. With many FPGAs you can have multiple 64-bit external memory ports that all run at full speed, for example 4 ports * 64bits/port * 200MHz optimized design yields 6.4 GBytes/sec of memory bandwidth.

Even a basic LX150 includes integrated Memory Controller blocks for DDR1-DRR3 memories at up to 12.8 Gb/s peak bandwidth (from spec sheet). This chip may or may not be optimal for scrypt, other chips offer higher max bandwidth. I think the main point is memory bandwidth shouldn't be a bottle neck if done right.

[yohan]

On Litecoin we do have a memory add-on for CM1 going into manufacture. I don't want anyone to think we have Litecoin mining now running on CM1. We don't and won't for at least some time to come give our current workload. This new module will simply be available anyone that wants to try and implement it on a CM1. On the big boards we will come back to Litecoin at some point but no promises when that might be.

I _might_ be interested in one such CM1 board with memory add-ons in order to try and hack a solution together in my spare time (which is very little these days between work and babies, and it is doubtful I would have enough time). Couple questions:

1) Have you done any sizing to estimate/optimize both the amount of memory and # of memory ports that would be optimal for scrypt and CM1? Otherwise the board configuration is a stab in the dark.

2) Would such a board come with the necessary IP blocks needed to interface with the add-on memory ports during Verilog development? This would make development easier and is usually provided with development boards.

3) If someone did successfully develop a scrypt miner, would you offer any business terms to make it available for others?

We don't think the memory solution for CM1 will be the most optimal Litecoin solution possible with FPGAs and interconnect bandwidth may be, or not, somewhat of a limitation. There is a local FPGA with the memory that may help in this solution. Whilst we think CM1s will remain profitable (more earning than electric cost) in Bitcoin mining for some time to come yet but we would like to see the many CM1 owners with a way forward with their boards into Litecoin.

We don't have them yet in final form but all the elements for the accessing the memory have been done before by the team before so I would anticipate we could get that knocked together into a workable form some time in September.

Someone made the comment that GPUs are ASICs. If you are working on that basis FPGAs are also ASICs. However it is worth saying that FPGAs can often compete with, and often beat, GPUs albeit usually with a different structural approach. Outside maybe a few people already working on FPGA Litecoin solutions I doubt anyone actually has the knowledge to say which will be better - GPU or FPGA at the moment. Our point here is that there is a awful lot of CM1s out there with potentially nothing to do in maybe 6-12 months time when we foresee Bitcoin being no longer profitable and provided CM1s operate in profit no reason not to do Litecoin at whatever level a CM1 can achieve.

I will also say that anyone having a serious attempt to do a Litecoin solution should talk to us partly so we know what is happening but it will also allow us to offer some limited help maybe technically or even some form of financial reward for a solution. On the latter this might be royalty (say based on memory module sales), or a straight payment in some form, or even a bounty. We have not discussed this or set anything up yet so I can't say more at this point about what we might do.

[Milan77]

There is a easier way to keep FPGA boards in game, just write sha1 bruteforcer for them.
It will keep them in a play for few more years!

[hf_developer]

Yes, there was a significant increase of hash rate for FPGAs in SHA256, but this is an effect of the possibility to fully unroll the SHA256 core. It then goes one hash per clock. MHz = MHash/s

This is algorithmically impossible for scrypt as this algorithm was specially designed to be resistant against that. In most linear algorithms you have two possibilities: Get a speed up with the need of more ressources, or save ressources but achieve a lower computation rate. If one side decreases, the other one increases and vice versa. Not so for scrypt. Both sides increase nearly equally.

Here you can see a scrypt demonstration on FPGA with hashrates ~ 2kh/s. (You need to be very experienced to make it twice that speed!):

https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner

Thank you hf_developer, this was very helpful. I was not aware of this effort and look forward to reading and understanding the code better.

The design only used the on-chip FPGA RAM of an LX150, which is fairly limited. With many FPGAs you can have multiple 64-bit external memory ports that all run at full speed, for example 4 ports * 64bits/port * 200MHz optimized design yields 6.4 GBytes/sec of memory bandwidth.

Even a basic LX150 includes integrated Memory Controller blocks for DDR1-DRR3 memories at up to 12.8 Gb/s peak bandwidth (from spec sheet). This chip may or may not be optimal for scrypt, other chips offer higher max bandwidth. I think the main point is memory bandwidth shouldn't be a bottle neck if done right.

Here is one portion of scrypt core:

for (i = 0; i < 1024; i += 2)
{
      memcpy(&V[i * 32], X, 128);

      salsa20_8(&X[0], &X[16]);
      salsa20_8(&X[16], &X[0]);

      memcpy(&V[(i + 1) * 32], X, 128);

      salsa20_8(&X[0], &X[16]);
      salsa20_8(&X[16], &X[0]);
   }

As you can see, you have to memcopy 128x8bit = 1024 bit. If you have those 64 bit rambusses you will need 16 of them to make this operation work in one cycle. This has to be done 2 times per loop, looping 1024 times (in full scrypt algorithm). You cannot hard-unroll this loop as you can with SHA256. You see, even if you had rambusses of 1024 bit, you need at least 2048 ram operations per scrypt. Assume your hardware runs at 500MHz. Divide this by 2048. Even then you cannot get higher rates than 250 kh/s. (...and you will never see an FPGA with 1024 bit rambusses)

[yohan]

Yes, there was a significant increase of hash rate for FPGAs in SHA256, but this is an effect of the possibility to fully unroll the SHA256 core. It then goes one hash per clock. MHz = MHash/s

This is algorithmically impossible for scrypt as this algorithm was specially designed to be resistant against that. In most linear algorithms you have two possibilities: Get a speed up with the need of more ressources, or save ressources but achieve a lower computation rate. If one side decreases, the other one increases and vice versa. Not so for scrypt. Both sides increase nearly equally.

Here you can see a scrypt demonstration on FPGA with hashrates ~ 2kh/s. (You need to be very experienced to make it twice that speed!):

https://github.com/kramble/FPGA-Litecoin-Miner

Thank you hf_developer, this was very helpful. I was not aware of this effort and look forward to reading and understanding the code better.

The design only used the on-chip FPGA RAM of an LX150, which is fairly limited. With many FPGAs you can have multiple 64-bit external memory ports that all run at full speed, for example 4 ports * 64bits/port * 200MHz optimized design yields 6.4 GBytes/sec of memory bandwidth.

Even a basic LX150 includes integrated Memory Controller blocks for DDR1-DRR3 memories at up to 12.8 Gb/s peak bandwidth (from spec sheet). This chip may or may not be optimal for scrypt, other chips offer higher max bandwidth. I think the main point is memory bandwidth shouldn't be a bottle neck if done right.

Here is one portion of scrypt core:

for (i = 0; i < 1024; i += 2)
{
      memcpy(&V[i * 32], X, 128);

      salsa20_8(&X[0], &X[16]);
      salsa20_8(&X[16], &X[0]);

      memcpy(&V[(i + 1) * 32], X, 128);

      salsa20_8(&X[0], &X[16]);
      salsa20_8(&X[16], &X[0]);
   }

As you can see, you have to memcopy 128x8bit = 1024 bit. If you have those 64 bit rambusses you will need 16 of them to make this operation work in one cycle. This has to be done 2 times per loop, looping 1024 times (in full scrypt algorithm). You cannot hard-unroll this loop as you can with SHA256. You see, even if you had rambusses of 1024 bit, you need at least 2048 ram operations per scrypt. Assume your hardware runs at 500MHz. Divide this by 2048. Even then you cannot get higher rates than 250 kh/s. (...and you will never see an FPGA with 1024 bit rambusses)

Actually indirectly we have already done a 1024 memory interface/FPGA in our HPC product Merrick4 that has 1024 bit memory interface and 16GB of local DDR3. What is different here is that this is done with 16 S6 FPGAs working together. Cost base is also expensive before anyone asks.

Once we have more time we will look at the viability of doing Litecoin on all of our HPC products. There are some better that than Merrick4 in the pipeline that have much more memory bandwidth and will trash GPUs in many applications and quite possibly Litecoin too.

[rocks]

Here is one portion of scrypt core:

for (i = 0; i < 1024; i += 2)
{
      memcpy(&V[i * 32], X, 128);

      salsa20_8(&X[0], &X[16]);
      salsa20_8(&X[16], &X[0]);

      memcpy(&V[(i + 1) * 32], X, 128);

      salsa20_8(&X[0], &X[16]);
      salsa20_8(&X[16], &X[0]);
   }

As you can see, you have to memcopy 128x8bit = 1024 bit. If you have those 64 bit rambusses you will need 16 of them to make this operation work in one cycle. This has to be done 2 times per loop, looping 1024 times (in full scrypt algorithm). You cannot hard-unroll this loop as you can with SHA256. You see, even if you had rambusses of 1024 bit, you need at least 2048 ram operations per scrypt. Assume your hardware runs at 500MHz. Divide this by 2048. Even then you cannot get higher rates than 250 kh/s. (...and you will never see an FPGA with 1024 bit rambusses)

So essentially you either need 2Mb/sec bandwidth per hash, or ~128KB on chip memory per hashing core. This means that an FPGA with 2 Gb/sec total memory and perfect pipelining would only achieve 1kHash/sec. OK the difficulty is clear, thanks.

This also means a GPU card achieving ~250kHash/sec has over 500Gb/sec of usable memory bandwidth, that is very impressive.

It also looks like the scrypt parameters litecoin chooses are optimized to take full advantage of common high-end GPU characteristics and no more, with a balanced ratio between GPU cores to B/W per core. If litecoin selected slightly larger parameters it seem likely GPUs that would be much less efficient and not be able to utilize all their available cores, but as it GPU bandwidth is just able to feed all the GPU cores...

[yohan]

One of our test boards with the new concept Cairnsmore4 and Controller1 module fitted. This board supports 16 Clusters of up to 9 Bitfury ASICs. We will talk more about the spec and pricing when we are happy with the firmware/software, thermal solution and are ready to ship. Meanwhile enjoy.

[shapemaker]

One of our test boards with the new concept Cairnsmore4 and Controller1 module fitted. This board supports 16 Clusters of up to 9 Bitfury ASICs. We will talk more about the spec and pricing when we are happy with the firmware/software, thermal solution and are ready to ship. Meanwhile enjoy.

So it has 144 BF ASICs. At 22,5 eur per chip, the chip cost alone is 3240 euros without bulk discounts. If you manage to get 4 GHash/s from each chip (as burnin already has), we're looking at 576 GH/s. At maybe 4 W per chip, the full unit would be using around 600 Watts of power.

If you manage to price that competitively, I'm sure you will have sales. The pricing is what will decide if people want that or not. Time to market is essential at the moment though so don't take too long.

edit: If you manage to deliver in October, that unit should be able to mine 50-75 BTC between Oct and May, depending on, of course, how harshly the difficulty rises in the next year. That will leave some wiggle room in pricing, so if we deduct chip price, we're looking at maybe 3000-3500 euros ROI. Now you just need to decide how much you want from that 3k euros and how much the customer should get.

[joeventura]

I predict BTC68 will be the cost

$14 USD a GH

[markm]

So a loss of eighteen to minus-two bitcoins, then? Seems like averaging across that range you're more likely to make a loss than a gain...

-MarkM-

[shapemaker]

I predict BTC68 will be the cost

$14 USD a GH

At that price there wouldn't be much point in buying. I'd guess 45-50 BTC would be a decent spot.

[eve]

I predict BTC68 will be the cost

$14 USD a GH

At that price there wouldn't be much point in buying. I'd guess 45-50 BTC would be a decent spot.

20-30 btc will be more attractive

[CryptoCluster]

I predict BTC68 will be the cost

$14 USD a GH

At that price there wouldn't be much point in buying. I'd guess 45-50 BTC would be a decent spot.

20-30 btc will be more attractive

And 0.5-1 BTC even more attractive.

[rocks]

Competitive pricing is by far the most important issue here.

I (and most people I suspect) just want a simple board populated with chips. In other words the exact same model as the Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards, where most of the cost was the FPGAs themselves and everything else was minimized.

My issue with the Cairnsmore2-3 proposals were all of the expensive racking and other 'engineering' put in raised the cost over the price of the base chips.

If this project and pricing goes the same way as Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards, which maximized the chip BOM vs. everything else, then I would be interested.

[shapemaker]

Competitive pricing is by far the most important issue here.

I (and most people I suspect) just want a simple board populated with chips. In other words the exact same model as the Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards, where most of the cost was the FPGAs themselves and everything else was minimized.

My issue with the Cairnsmore2-3 proposals were all of the expensive racking and other 'engineering' put in raised the cost over the price of the base chips.

If this project and pricing goes the same way as Cairnsmore1 FPGA boards, which maximized the chip BOM vs. everything else, then I would be interested.

Agreed. There are quite a few BF based products coming very soon now. The primary differentiating factors now are
a) how cheaply a complete product can be made, and
b) how much juice one can get out of the chips.

Performance ties neatly into a) since if you can minimize the amount of chips used while still getting a decent hashrate, you can push price lower than competition. I would say simplicity at this point is key, not fancy pants features that just increase fail rate.

The chip is an interesting one, since it is very power efficient and apparently can be pushed to at least 4GH/s. I wonder how much more one could get by just die shrinking...

[spiccioli]

Competitive pricing is by far the most important issue here.

Chips are 22,5 EUR each (plus VAT if you're an end user).

Chip price is insane, those chips should cost less than one EUR each to make (maybe even less).

Enterpoint had a good product with CM1s and first units where priced right at 520 EUR/each + VAT or thereabout.

If CM4s end up costing more than 50-55 BTC it is very difficult to breakeven and if they price them cheaper they'll end up selling a ton, so making breakeven more difficult as well.

spiccioli

[rocks]

Chips are 22,5 EUR each (plus VAT if you're an end user).

Chip price is insane, those chips should cost less than one EUR each to make (maybe even less).

Agreed, these chip prices are currently priced at a steep markup to the actual costs. Most of this is due to the fact that the chip designers need to recoup their development & NRE costs, plus make a profit.

When mining reaches break-even with limited ROI, purchases of new chips/rigs will slow or stop. This happened in the GPU/FPGA era. When this happens all of these chip vendors will be forced by competition to drop prices much closer to their actual manufacturing cost to keep making some sort of profit, and pricing will become more stable and reasonable.

[bit_wizard]

Any word on the CM3?

[yohan]

Any word on the CM3?

We are working on CM3 in parallel to CM4 and we have development prototypes that look a bit like the picture of the CM4 where we are working on 1 cluster of chips. A lot of the software control functions are actually common with CM4 and I expect both products will be ready in a similar timeframe.

[spiccioli]

Chips are 22,5 EUR each (plus VAT if you're an end user).

Chip price is insane, those chips should cost less than one EUR each to make (maybe even less).

Agreed, these chip prices are currently priced at a steep markup to the actual costs. Most of this is due to the fact that the chip designers need to recoup their development & NRE costs, plus make a profit.

I think they're priced so high because chip designers need to keep competition low, they're all setting up private pools which is where their earnings will come from.

Avalon batch #1 were priced 1500 USD and each unit uses 240 chips and has a full aluminum case and heatsinks weighting 20 Kg plus a decent PSU.

At 22 EUR each chip an Avalon had to be 6500 USD just in chips... they did try with batch 3 to price them in this way, but I think that in the end they found that mining with the units was better than selling them because selling units increases difficulty for everyone.

spiccioli

[tigerbit]

CM3 being Avalon based, right?  Or was that the super FPGA hybrid?

Is there even any interest in Avalon based options any longer?  Surely it's no longer viable.

[yohan]

CM3 being Avalon based, right?  Or was that the super FPGA hybrid?

Is there even any interest in Avalon based options any longer?  Surely it's no longer viable.

It is not much extra work over what we have to do for CM4 to make CM3 hash so we think it is worth completing that work. We have enough stock of chips to give us some return for doing the work. It is also possible that the second generation Avalon will appear as promised and if those are compatible with gen1 footprints we can build CM3 with gen2 chips as soon as they are available or make small design changes to accomodate the gen2.

[VinCeCream]

I predict BTC68 will be the cost

$14 USD a GH

At that price there wouldn't be much point in buying. I'd guess 45-50 BTC would be a decent spot.

20-30 btc will be more attractive

And 0.5-1 BTC even more attractive.

Indeed ...