BFL ASIC mining board project

[mmmerlin]

Awesome!  

[mmmerlin]

Sweet MrTeal!  Who is gonna be able to get boards from first batch?  Gonna be in order of order?      

BTW, waiting for mined BTC to finish confirms and will get the last 50% Chip payment out on Thurday.

Presumably the production run of the boards will be done by the time the chips arrive so it won't make any difference?

[Dagger75]

Sweet MrTeal!  Who is gonna be able to get boards from first batch?  Gonna be in order of order?      

BTW, waiting for mined BTC to finish confirms and will get the last 50% Chip payment out on Thurday.

Presumably the production run of the boards will be done by the time the chips arrive so it won't make any difference?

True, true   

Gonna be fun to have some open firmware boards to overclock w/ aftermarket coolers and watercoolers.  Makes for a very enjoyable project IMO.

[shmadz]

Sorry but that photo deserves to be shown again. It's truly beautiful. I can't wait to see it fully populated. (man that sounds dirty  )

Whose design work is that? is that you? or chipgeek? or both??

Also, are you planning to have the airflow moving from the chips towards the vrms? or the other way around? I'm curious to see which need more cooling, seeing as the hashrate seems to go up wrt voltage almost linearly, whereas it seems like you haven't even explored changing the clockrate, but now I'm babbling. 

Very exciting project.

[ysyang21]

Just curious about if there's a reference design of how to mount 12 8-chip board and setup the cooling solution/power supply in an elegant way?

And since its hash power fall on about the power of BFL's 'Single', are you considering to give it a code name? maybe 'Singular' or 'Singleton'??

[ChipGeek]

Sorry but that photo deserves to be shown again. It's truly beautiful. I can't wait to see it fully populated. (man that sounds dirty  )

Whose design work is that? is that you? or chipgeek? or both??

Also, are you planning to have the airflow moving from the chips towards the vrms? or the other way around? I'm curious to see which need more cooling, seeing as the hashrate seems to go up wrt voltage almost linearly, whereas it seems like you haven't even explored changing the clockrate, but now I'm babbling. 

Very exciting project.

MrTeal did all of the schematic and board layout.  I helped with MCU selection (different than BFL's MCU) and the general concept of what we wanted in the hardware.  MrTeal did 100% of the voltage regulator selection and design.  I wrote all of the firmware and I'm still making some major improvements over the next few days.  (Details are expected to be announced next week.)

We have experimented extensively with clock settings and changing voltage.  We have a very good understanding of how that works.  The VRM does generate quite a bit of heat.  These newest boards have heavier copper layers to assist in cooling but some airflow will likely be a good idea.

BTW - That photo is for 2 boards in a "panel".  The assembly house prefers to make two boards at once.  Then, after all components are mounted, the boards are snapped apart.

[ChipGeek]

Just curious about if there's a reference design of how to mount 12 8-chip board and setup the cooling solution/power supply in an elegant way?

And since its hash power fall on about the power of BFL's 'Single', are you considering to give it a code name? maybe 'Singular' or 'Singleton'??

We do not have an explicit "reference design" exactly.  But since these are able to plug into any PCI Express slot (x1 to x16), you should be able to find PC or server cases that are appropriate for your needs.  MrTeal has located some interesting ones but I'm NOT going to bother him tonight since he's making new boards right now.     

Our board is only 8 chips so it's more like BFL's little single.  We do have a project name picked out.  Look for it coming soon.

[shmadz]

Just curious about if there's a reference design of how to mount 12 8-chip board and setup the cooling solution/power supply in an elegant way?

And since its hash power fall on about the power of BFL's 'Single', are you considering to give it a code name? maybe 'Singular' or 'Singleton'??

not sure about 12, and not sure about elegant    but I'm thinking of building an enclosure something like this.

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open on both ends with 1 unit inside each compartment, then putting a box fan on the front and just leave the back open for all the wires and PSU and what not.

I'm assuming you can run 4 easy with a 1200W PSU? or is that pushing it?

depending on the size, I guess you could maybe make it 3X3 squares, which would fit 9, but I'd probably block off the middle box and only load 8.

[ChipGeek]

We don't have any hard numbers yet but we believe our 8 chips board will deliver 30GH/s (+/-) at about 150W (+/-). 

Remember, this is more like a BFL Little Single and not a full Single.

[nexus99]

Looking forward to getting my 16 chips mounted to boards!!!

[af_newbie]

Willing to sell my 128 chips for BTC20.

There is $3200 to pay to BFL.  The chips will be shipped before Sept 30.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=303224.0

Need to find a buyer today or tomorrow.

[Choadmeyer]

i would laugh so loud if BFL will deliver chips on time and go over avalon 

Start laughing. 

[nwfella]

My hats off to MrTeal and ChipGeek both, that is one sexy looking board I must say.

[Choadmeyer]

My hats off to MrTeal and ChipGeek both, that is one sexy looking board I must say.

Hats off indeed! Way to go you two!


Any idea when boards will be available for chip mounting?

[ChipGeek]

My hats off to MrTeal and ChipGeek both, that is one sexy looking board I must say.

Hats off indeed! Way to go you two!
Any idea when boards will be available for chip mounting?

Thanks guys.  Look for an announcement from MrTeal very soon.  Maybe tomorrow.

And yes, those boards look fantastic.  MrTeal did a great job.  I can't wait to get one in the mail tomorrow.

[jelin1984]

fianl is board for 8 chips or 16 chips?

[mmmerlin]

Yes, a big thank you to both MrTeal and ChipGeek for making this a reality, incredibly smooth and professional!

Question: how are people going to house their boards? They have PCI brackets on them, but I have a lot of boards coming and would quite like to get some sort of casing that can hold rows and rows of PCI cards, but don't have a stack of old motherboards lying around, which would have worked.

Does anyone know of any cases for holding rows of PCI cards? Or have any other thoughts on how to handle this? (and obviously space needs to be left for the coolers in between)

[mmmerlin]

fianl is board for 8 chips or 16 chips?

8.

[Bogart]

Yes, a big thank you to both MrTeal and ChipGeek for making this a reality, incredibly smooth and professional!

Question: how are people going to house their boards? They have PCI brackets on them, but I have a lot of boards coming and would quite like to get some sort of casing that can hold rows and rows of PCI cards, but don't have a stack of old motherboards lying around, which would have worked.

Does anyone know of any cases for holding rows of PCI cards? Or have any other thoughts on how to handle this? (and obviously space needs to be left for the coolers in between)

I'll bet you could buy some old GPU miners' used frames for not too much.

[ChipGeek]

fianl is board for 8 chips or 16 chips?

Final board is 8 chips.  We thought about 16 and decided the size, power and cooling would be issues.  However, our architecture fully supports 16 and we COULD make a 16 chip board in the future.  I'm just not sure either of us are willing to take on that much work and stress at this point.