Supposed ASIC Scrypt Miner | Scrypt ASIC International

[Numien]

In theory, there's nothing to prevent someone from making an ASIC Litecoin miner. The scrypt function is only resistant to it, not immune. What it does do is force the chip designers to eat up die space with all that memory, instead of using it for more parallelism.

Their claimed rates are... high, but it would probably be possible to at least approach those numbers with current lithography technology. However, the cost of designing, tooling, and manufacturing a chip that powerful would be so huge, it would result in units being sold for at least 7 digits, and nobody is going to pay that for a Litecoin miner. It wouldn't be even remotely worth the cost.

So far as I can see they aren't giving a price yet, but most likely they'll try to match the Bitcoin ASIC designers at low-to-mid 4 digits. If they do, that'll be solid proof it's fiction.

[1715600718]

1715600718

[jdebunt]

clearly fake & scam, as said before, a wordpress template?
No contact info?
Stolen images?

Do we really need to go on?

[Numien]

Over 600GB of GDDR5 or its equivalent will be needed and there is no way it's being powered by 500W.

No, it wouldn't need even remotely near that much. Your GPU's mining isn't limited by its available memory, it's limited mostly by its processing speed and number of registers. Those gigabytes of memory are barely touched.

For ASICs, however, even the relatively small amount it needs (quoted as 128kB per core earlier in this thread; I'm not sure that's accurate, my impression was it's only 16kB, based on 16 byte hash size * 1024 scrypt parameter, but I haven't looked into it that closely so could easily be wrong) is a lot of space vs. a 16 byte SHA256 used by Bitcoin.

That, in turn, means a lot less parallelism in a given mm2 of die, meaning you'd have to make a much larger and more complex chip (or have many of them) to get a rate like 50 MH/s.

Of course, that would use more power. But power use can be combatted by using a smaller lithography size, at the price of exponentially more expensive manufacturing equipment.

So yes, in theory, it may be possible to build a 50 MH/s for 500W of power. Possibly. But you'd need multi-billion-dollar chip fab equipment, and the large chips would both be expensive to produce and have a very high percentage of them with errors, needing to be thrown out.

End result, nobody is going to make that in practice. Not arguing against it being obviously fake.

[CaptChadd]

I have been watching this for a while now. They have updated post now and it explains a little bit more but they are really holding their cards to there chest.

I would like to see a newletter signup section added though.

If there was a buy button on there already I would say 100% scam and stay well away but they seem to be holding off right now.

[CaptChadd]

I just got an email back from them, they have added a forum section now to answer any questions, of which I have loads.

They even have a project running of a miner that can mine scrypt but then with a push of a button mine SHA-256.

This could be just a wind up but if it true this could change a lot of things.

I mean if that wanted to scam, wouldn't they be asking for money right now?

I am tempted to throw some Bitcoins at it and see what happens, its only Bitcoins a few Bitcoins after all.

[Operatr]

I just got an email back from them, they have added a forum section now to answer any questions, of which I have loads.

They even have a project running of a miner that can mine scrypt but then with a push of a button mine SHA-256.

This could be just a wind up but if it true this could change a lot of things.

I mean if that wanted to scam, wouldn't they be asking for money right now?

I am tempted to throw some Bitcoins at it and see what happens, its only Bitcoins a few Bitcoins after all.

A Scrypt ASIC chip cannot just magically switch to SHA and vice versa, this company is telling porky pies, don't send them any money. Bitcoins are valuable why waste them on something as unprofessional and scammy as this dog and pony show.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I just got an email back from them, they have added a forum section now to answer any questions, of which I have loads.

They even have a project running of a miner that can mine scrypt but then with a push of a button mine SHA-256.

This could be just a wind up but if it true this could change a lot of things.

I mean if that wanted to scam, wouldn't they be asking for money right now?

I am tempted to throw some Bitcoins at it and see what happens, its only Bitcoins a few Bitcoins after all.

A Scrypt ASIC chip cannot just magically switch to SHA and vice versa, this company is telling porky pies, don't send them any money. Bitcoins are valuable why waste them on something as unprofessional and scammy as this dog and pony show.

Yeah that idiotic statement reduced the chance of it being legit from 0.0001% to 0.0000% even.  No sense in even wasting time.

[FiiNALiZE]

I just got an email back from them, they have added a forum section now to answer any questions, of which I have loads.

They even have a project running of a miner that can mine scrypt but then with a push of a button mine SHA-256.

This could be just a wind up but if it true this could change a lot of things.

I mean if that wanted to scam, wouldn't they be asking for money right now?

I am tempted to throw some Bitcoins at it and see what happens, its only Bitcoins a few Bitcoins after all.

Well if you want to throw away BTC that easily, why not give them to me? I'll take good care of them

It'll be a better than investing in a little black box that could magically transform itself so it could hash SHA-256 instead of Scrypt.

[ohiwastedmylif]

'koolio' just did a UK meetup and announced that he is working on a FPGA Scrypt miner and had a 'proof of concept' present is what I was told today.

This SAI is from UK as well, would be funny if it was his website.

[CaptChadd]

I would never have believed that SHA ASIC's would see the light of day but they have.

I think a lot of people have been in the background working hard and maybe SAI is full of it but I have a feeling others will follow, even if they fail to deliver.

Just a matter if time.

[ohiwastedmylif]

I still do not believe it will be anywhere near as efficient as the BTC ASIC or FPGA. It requires larges ammounts of specific memory hardware in order to increase hashing speeds.

The one thing they could have done to increase hash rates is generate a large table of the needed lookups. You can read a little about it here in this post: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/1307

I was also wondering perhaps there is some way to partition the RAM in order to use less since scrypt does not fully use it all. That would greatly reduce the total RAM needed.

[CaptChadd]

I'm going to go for it but only order one when batch number 1 opens up. Nothing to lose other that a few Bitcoin. Better than my 25GH's BFL miner that I have yet to see.

[FiiNALiZE]

I'm going to go for it but only order one when batch number 1 opens up. Nothing to lose other that a few Bitcoin. Better than my 25GH's BFL miner that I have yet to see.

Please don't tell me you're actually going to fall for this.

We're talking about over $2,000 USD here. At least wait until some tangible proof comes out that the ASIC actually exists before blindly throwing your money away.

[Operatr]

I would never have believed that SHA ASIC's would see the light of day but they have.

I think a lot of people have been in the background working hard and maybe SAI is full of it but I have a feeling others will follow, even if they fail to deliver.

Just a matter if time.

Though SHA ASIC made sense for SHA, but Scrypt is a very different animal that will not benefit from ASIC nearly as much as SHA coin did. Scrypt was designed deliberately to be a tough hash requiring much more intensive memory usage, economically ASICs for Scrypt may not be that much better than FPGA solutions in performance vs cost, but we'll see. The good news however is that FPGA implementations can be carried over to ASIC hardware

[fenican]

Coolermaster makes some nice looking cases!

[fluffypony]

I'm going to go for it but only order one when batch number 1 opens up. Nothing to lose other that a few Bitcoin. Better than my 25GH's BFL miner that I have yet to see.

Please don't be that guy. There is no logical way to conclude that an ASIC is even possible, given the memory requirements of scrypt hashing. If you're going to spend money then phone the company, get all the info you want, and ask for a video demonstration of it hashing!

[yager]

I finally got my asic miner prototype, what a lovely unit.



Not quite getting the 50,000 Kh/s yet though

[kramble]

For ASICs, however, even the relatively small amount it needs (quoted as 128kB per core earlier in this thread; I'm not sure that's accurate, my impression was it's only 16kB, based on 16 byte hash size * 1024 scrypt parameter, but I haven't looked into it that closely so could easily be wrong) is a lot of space vs. a 16 byte SHA256 used by Bitcoin.

We can trade processing time for memory (TMTO) to reduce the scratchpad size at the expense of processing time (the missing entries are calculated on the fly from the prior scratchpad values). This is used in the GPU miners (the LOOKUP_GAP parameter). It gives a large boost for small values (eg a 64kB scratchpad takes 25% longer to process, but we can fit double the number of cores for an overall 60% throughput gain). I haven't done the math as to how far its possible to take this, but eg on FPGA's the internal memory is the biggest constraint, so there is a lot of free logic, and a 32kB or even 16kB scratchpad is likely to be optimum. (BTW the final PBKDF2_SHA256 hash is 32 bytes, but the salsa mix operates on a 128 byte variable, hence 128 * 1024 = 128kB scratchpad).

The website has similarities to http://alpha-technology.myshopify.com/ also UK based, who claimed to be working on a FPGA miner until his engineers told him it wasn't feasible. Now claims to be developing a GPU miner. Perhaps one of this associates has decided to spin off their own business to sell the concept? Anyway the one being discussed here is clearly a scam, I'm not so sure about alpha-technology, he may just be delusional about what he can achieve.

[CaptChadd]

I contacted these guys a few days ago, didn't feel like joining their forum until I think about making an order.

They emailed back saying that the 50,000 KH/s might be an overestimation due to size constrictions. I guess they want the unit as small as they can get it, reminds me a little of BFL with unit size.

I asked if they are not releasing something a little smaller and they said one was in the works.

I guess only time will tell but still they are not even asking for any money or pre orders, I take that as a good sign,

[minerapia]

Bait has been set, Now they wait fish to swim to the net, before they collect.