UPDATE: Here is TAT's excellent transcript of the first Q/A session:
1. Please give us a detailed specification of the chip and its current status. What is the power efficiency?
Alright,the 130nm IC is designed to work at about 200 Mhz for core, with a total consumption of 0.8W per core, hashing performances of about 200 mhash per core, total speed will depend on the overall output grade.
The IC covers an area of 6.5mm x 6.5mm and it has been designed following ideas similar to those employed in the bitfury ASIC.
2. How will you show transparency with the 75% retained shares?
the IPO manager will arrange some kind of way for burnside to release that information
3. Are your first run ASICs in production?
the first test run is already out to fab
4. How many chips do you expect to get out of the first batch? When will you have sample chips?
estimate date for receiving sample chip, one week later, if there are no delays, the plan is having boards produced within the first week of september
5. How is it possible to create chips with a such much better performance than the competitors. You've arranged them to fit more on the same size? For that to be possible, not only each Labcoin core would have to be ~42% smaller [65/130*(6.5^2)/(7.1^2)] than each BFL core but also the Labcoin chip would magically operate at a higher frequency (300MHz vs 250MHz) while keeping the same power draw...
rolled cores instead of unrolled, sea-of-hashers approach. as in sea-of-gates. you can google this term and find out more about what it means technically. i remind you guys that the bitfury chip has up to 750 cores. they also use the same approach, we chose this design because one of our guys was close to bitfury developments 2 months ago
6. What is the software used for mining, protocol development ? I am assuming Theseven will be doing the firmware part?
yes theSeven is working on a sophisticated interface for the 65nm version
7. Is Labcoin a hardware sales or mining co?
We will focus on deploying internal hash power initially and won't ship USB miners yet, time is tight
8. How many wafers? How many TH's will be hashing in September? That knowledge will be known as soon as you get the chips, correct?
well not 30-50 TH. not sure what will be the yield of the test-run but it's in the thousands ICs. correct, also,next week we'll have the next batch going out to fab
in september we may have a few TH. i can't give exact figures, by the end of Sept, initial week of october we'll have the full speed online.
9. Is this chip the same design as the 180nm? or a completely new one?
it's based on similar design choices,but it's indeed different, as it's using a different library,different logic blocks layout
10. How can you fit 16 cores on 6.5x6.5 ? How many cores on average per chip, what is your assumption
The cores we have fit are not classical "unrolled cores",the cores as we mean them are the result of our engineering effort. i'll pass the questions i can't reply to the lead developer
11. Labcoin seems almost small now in the light of new competitors like btcgarden, hashfast, actm, terrahash.. do you think you can keep up?
btcgarden? Well, guys, i would do a reality check before saying such things. Undoubtedly ASICMINER, AVALON and maybe BFL have some kind of advantage. But we don't see how we are inferior to those vaporware companies. What in their announcement makes them more convincing than us? time will tell and the sheer of technical details we have provided is not trivial. it's very unlikely we are making everything up
12. So if everything goes as planned - we'll see Labcoin start hashing in the first week of September? Can you please confirm?
confirm, hashing with moderate speed and testing and within the end of the month, we'll have the full speed online
13. What are the chances that the chips won't work? can you guestimate?
we're not worried about this, as soon as the hashing power comes up, the price will go the right route. there's a small chance that the chip won't work, but very very small. it's much more common to get slightly underperforming chips rather than completely dead ones
14. Who is Samuel Noi?
Sam is our nominee director, Fabrizio is the founder
15. What's the status of the boards? How long will it take after testing to get all the board you need, set them up with chips and get them hashing?
The boards are near their design completion and will be tested as soon as we have the chips. we'll post pictures of the boards very soon. it will take about 7-10 days to get all the boards up and running probablyand, for the first run, we have 500 boards on order
16. Do you still depend on suppliers or do you have everything in stock? and what tools for p&r, sta, layout
we use Mentor mostly, and its suite. we still depend on suppliers but we're closing in the gap. we'll be ordering components according to the volume needed to avoid bottlenecks. 24july first one
17. Where is the lab? Shenzhen or Hongkong? Can we have a chance to visit? When if not now?
lab is located in SZ, at the university facility, we'll be moving shorty to another office. we'll be inviting selected investors to visit our datacenter in september
18.
http://www.labcoin.com/presentation.html are these photos of the real where u r working in?
yes,they are real. it's the university i mentioned
UPDATE:
I hope you felt that the Q/A session was informative. I will also, since he is an Authority that carries a fair amount of 'weight' in the forum make sure to ask
TheSeven to take a more active role in the forum and our updates. As you have probably learned by now I am myself not an engineer or involved in development so the process of me asking Labcoin questions and them passing the answers to the forum via myself isn't the best route for technical discussion.
Thank you again!
