Goliath Miner

[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.