Cointerra Mining ASIC coming soon

[Loredo]

Thanks for rooting for Cointerra! We will make all Texans proud

Most real Texans aren't proud of anything that goes on in Austin, with the possible exception of football.  And then, only some years.   

In any case, I wish you the best of luck and greatest of fortune!

[Bitcoinorama]

we can almost certainly assume another pre-order which will undoubtedly elicit a familiar response, but again is par for the course as they have no significant funding to manufacture otherwise.

Maybe, and i hope you're wrong on that.  Here's the risk in pre-orders at this point, and why I'm more puzzled with each new one.  

Nobody is going to buy into a pre-order scheme without some way (escrow, PayPal, credit card) to refund the order any more. And all it's going to take is one announcement by someone who has the chip on the board and the board in the box with the mailing label stuck on the day the credit card authorizes.  Every one of the pre-orders would be a ghost town at that point.

You can say "yeah, but nobody has that kind of money."  Would you be willing to bet a couple million dollars on that?  Because that's what these pre-orders are doing.

Obv. I don't know, it a guess based on what details we have available. They claim in this thread to be well funded, that gives the impression they won't need pre-orders, yet on their site they mention seed capital of $1.2 million which barely covers the cumulative annual wages their current team is accustomed to. It could cover the path to taping out. It's no where near enough to cover 28nm dev. through fab, that's 100% certain. Let's just wait and see. Interesting times, if even solely as an observer...

[solex]

Wow. What an impressive team! It is going to be interesting seeing what happens when Cointerra is shipping...

[ecliptic]

Also I doubt their own wages come cheap.

Who needs wages when you're making machines that print money?  Their work is quite literally its own reward.  I'd rather be paid in top end 22nm chips than USD for a project like this.

[Loredo]

They claim in this thread to be well funded, that gives the impression they won't need pre-orders, yet on their site they mention seed capital of $1.2 million

Do you happen to know:  how much did ASICminer raise, adjusting the BTC exchange rate back to what it was at the time of their offerings? 

If you don't piss it away, and have a sizable endowment of human capital, a million dollars can be a lot of money. 

[minternj]

Yet another preorder asic miner.

[NiteShdw]

Yet another preorder asic miner.

Given the costs involved in manufacturing these devices, it seems pretty reasonable that there would be a pre-order system.  The other alternative would be to ask for investors, which would pretty much still be like a pre-order in that you would invest money into the company without a guaranteed return.  It's risk either way you do it.

[Bitcoinorama]

Also I doubt their own wages come cheap.

Who needs wages when you're making machines that print money?  Their work is quite literally its own reward.  I'd rather be paid in top end 22nm chips than USD for a project like this.

Will have to see, I tend to agree esp. if I would get the luxury of purchasing devices at cost...

[minternj]

Yet another preorder asic miner.

Given the costs involved in manufacturing these devices, it seems pretty reasonable that there would be a pre-order system.  The other alternative would be to ask for investors, which would pretty much still be like a pre-order in that you would invest money into the company without a guaranteed return.  It's risk either way you do it.

Except the first post said they were well funded. Guess their investors need to pass on risk to greater fools ASAP.

[Bitcoinorama]

They claim in this thread to be well funded, that gives the impression they won't need pre-orders, yet on their site they mention seed capital of $1.2 million

Do you happen to know:  how much did ASICminer raise, adjusting the BTC exchange rate back to what it was at the time of their offerings? 

If you don't piss it away, and have a sizable endowment of human capital, a million dollars can be a lot of money. 

I appreciate that, and people with that kind of money have plenty of opportunity, both good, and bad, which is why most VC is not keen on assuming the lions share of risk within these ventures, but let's be realistic, ASICminer weren't designing 28nm chip based devices from the get go, that takes around 4x what Cointerra currently claim to have in place...

[Ytterbium]

Interesting.  Here we get the resume's of the actual IC designers, compared to HashFast who's IC designers are "anonymous"

Ok, so by 'well funded' they mean a $1.2m 'Angel investment' which for all intensive purposes will be spanked on the journey to tape-out. Also I doubt their own wages come cheap. So they are almost certainly a few mil shy of 28nm fab, therefore we can almost certainly assume another pre-order which will undoubtedly elicit a familiar response, but again is par for the course as they have no significant funding to manufacture otherwise.

Timewise it appears to be they will be head to head with Hashfast. Seed funding wise both Hashfast and Cointerra have tape out covered.

I'm not really sure if they would need too. They could probably raise money from VCs if they needed too. Essentially doing what Labcoin did, but with USD instead of bitcoin and actual legal shares instead of "for entertainment purposes only" shares on BTCT. They had $1.8 million worth of BTC locked up in buy orders before their IPO, and they actually turned away 60% of it (which they didn't even need to do according to the way the site normally works, the operator had to write new code on the fly to turn down the money and distribute shares evenly)

There are all kinds of legal issues that would make raising money that way difficult in the U.S.  But you can still issue shares to 'qualified investors' who have a certain net worth, as well as from venture capital funds.

Anyway, that said they do plan on offering pre-orders, according to their FAQ:

We’re expecting our price to be much lower than the current mining products for a given Gigahash performance.  And we will offer substantial discounts for pre orders or large orders to help us with our production costs.

___

Hashfast have 'partnered' with Uniquify that almost certainly means they have given away equity for use of time, staff and deskspace and split costs associated with tape out...

We don't really know what the deal is between Uniquify and HashFast. It's not uncommon for companies in silicon valley to have "incubators" for startups, it doesn't mean all that much.  HashFast may simply have raised a ton of money and simply paid Uniquify for their services.

It'll be interesting to see how Labcoin's designs turn out.  Their claim is that they'll be able to get way better performance with a 130nm core then BFL, with their 65nm core by doing a hand-routed design.  If these guys actually have a lot of experience laying out 28nm chips, then they may be able to get a similar performance boost over KnC.

They also seem to be focusing on low power use as well, which could be useful down the road as the market is flooded with ASICs and energy efficiency becomes the longer-term goal, as it started to become with GPUs.

Anyway, it's certainly an interesting new entrant.

In the short run, though I'm a little worried that we're just going to see a massive over-investment in ICs, with each company out there wanting to be the next ASICMiner - at the point where their mining revenue can fund more chip production. So we may see way more money thrown at the problem then can be extracted in any reasonable timeframe. At that point you'll see a shakeout in the industry, with only the most efficient companies able to make a profit while ever increasing their hashpower.

On the other hand, I think a big part of the spike from $10 to $100 in price was due to people who were GPU mining worried they'd never see profitability again.  If the same thing happens to ASIC miners, who'd been selling coins we could see another price crunch - not in anticipation of a new generation of technology, but rather the extinction of the get-rich quick phase of bitcoin entirely.

Interesting days ahead. Anyway you get the point.

[Ytterbium]

They claim in this thread to be well funded, that gives the impression they won't need pre-orders, yet on their site they mention seed capital of $1.2 million

Do you happen to know:  how much did ASICminer raise, adjusting the BTC exchange rate back to what it was at the time of their offerings? 

If you don't piss it away, and have a sizable endowment of human capital, a million dollars can be a lot of money. 

I appreciate that, and people with that kind of money have plenty of opportunity, both good, and bad, which is why most VC is not keen on assuming the lions share of risk within these ventures, but let's be realistic, ASICminer weren't designing 28nm chip based devices from the get go, that takes around 4x what Cointerra currently claim to have in place...

Dude what are you talking about?  Assuming risk is what VC's do.  At least in the U.S.  That is their entire reason for existing.

They invest in lots of high-risk high reward ventures, assuming most will fail but that the ones that succeed will cover everything.

[turtle83]

we can almost certainly assume another pre-order which will undoubtedly elicit a familiar response, but again is par for the course as they have no significant funding to manufacture otherwise.

Maybe, and i hope you're wrong on that.  Here's the risk in pre-orders at this point, and why I'm more puzzled with each new one.  

Nobody is going to buy into a pre-order scheme without some way (escrow, PayPal, credit card) to refund the order any more. And all it's going to take is one announcement by someone who has the chip on the board and the board in the box with the mailing label stuck on the day the credit card authorizes.  Every one of the pre-orders would be a ghost town at that point.

You can say "yeah, but nobody has that kind of money."  Would you be willing to bet a couple million dollars on that?  Because that's what these pre-orders are doing.

Obv. I don't know, it a guess based on what details we have available. They claim in this thread to be well funded, that gives the impression they won't need pre-orders, yet on their site they mention seed capital of $1.2 million which barely covers the cumulative annual wages their current team is accustomed to. It could cover the path to taping out. It's no where near enough to cover 28nm dev. through fab, that's 100% certain. Let's just wait and see. Interesting times, if even solely as an observer...

I don't know about the tape out costs.. but on the topic of wages, most early startup founders(and early employees) work for a significant amount of time for "sweat equity" ... in exchange for potential huge payouts when company makes profit, or exits.

[Aajo]

I hope you (cointerra) realize that it will not be easy to aquire money from pre-orders at this point in time. It would be much easier to sell shares of your company, which could still work although you went with private investors so far.

Also I hope you realize that there is a not so unlikely scenario where energy efficiency from ASICs < 1W/GH will never matter. In order to make it matter the network would have to grow > 50 PHash/s while the usd/btc price would stay at 100$. The more the price rises..

[ampu]

http://www.cointerra.com/faq/

What about Pricing?
We’re expecting our price to be much lower than the current mining products for a given Gigahash performance.  And we will offer substantial discounts for pre orders or large orders to help us with our production

About the company?

Over the last couple of months, Cointerra has raised $1.5m in angel investment from a range of successful Bitcoin and technology investors.  We have more than enough cash to fund 100% of the design of this ASIC and it is nearing completion.    Like other ASIC companies before us, we will offer preorders at special pricing and priority delivery in order to bring in the cashflow for our pilot production, and it will be well worth your while to consider this option.

Can you please kindly ask you angel to pre order all you future production and then come here with product in hand?

So, what's your company USP (Unique Selling Point) compared with others?!

[goxed]

BTC mining is a drag race, the one who has the most hashing power the earliest wins. I think there's no need for shiny hardware. Unless 28nm cointerra is 10x or more efficient than 55nm Bitfury this hardware is already late in the game. Good luck though, underdogs have certainly changed the rules of the game in the past .

[yottahash]

Exciting, looks like amateur hour is almost over.

Might miss this on their website, but CoinTerra has partnered with Open-Silicon for their ASIC design:
http://www.cointerra.com/cointerra-selects-open-silicon-for-next-generation-bitcoin-asics/

-----------------------
CoinTerra selects Open-Silicon for next generation BitCoin ASICs

July 24, 2013 Austin, TX. – CoinTerra, a company leading the next wave of silicon-based BitCoin mining, today announced that it has selected Open-Silicon as their ASIC design and development partner. Selecting Open-Silicon paves the way forward to building the highest-performing hashing ASICs available in the market, which consume only a fraction of the power consumed by other mining ASICs.

CoinTerra’s world-class expertise in ASIC architecture combined with Open-Silicon’s track record in ASIC solutions – including design and manufacturing – is a dynamic blend, which will soon result in bringing the most advanced bitcoin mining products to market.

“We selected Open-Silicon because they bring years of experience in getting working silicon to market” said Ravi Iyengar, CEO of CoinTerra Inc. “When you are designing ASICs at the 2Xnm node and below, you need a partner like Open-Silicon who has completed over 300 ASIC solutions, shipped more than 75 million ASICs, and has an outstanding track record of meeting their committed schedules on time.”

“Our expertise and years of experience are well aligned with CoinTerra’s technical needs,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, President & CEO of Open-Silicon, Inc. “It is great to work with a company that understands its market and thinks far ahead about their needs and requirements in order to achieve their short-term and long-term goals, ” said Dr. Sherwani.

[Noogsy]

Exciting, looks like amateur hour is almost over.

Might miss this on their website, but CoinTerra has partnered with Open-Silicon for their ASIC design:
http://www.cointerra.com/cointerra-selects-open-silicon-for-next-generation-bitcoin-asics/

-----------------------
CoinTerra selects Open-Silicon for next generation BitCoin ASICs

July 24, 2013 Austin, TX. – CoinTerra, a company leading the next wave of silicon-based BitCoin mining, today announced that it has selected Open-Silicon as their ASIC design and development partner. Selecting Open-Silicon paves the way forward to building the highest-performing hashing ASICs available in the market, which consume only a fraction of the power consumed by other mining ASICs.

CoinTerra’s world-class expertise in ASIC architecture combined with Open-Silicon’s track record in ASIC solutions – including design and manufacturing – is a dynamic blend, which will soon result in bringing the most advanced bitcoin mining products to market.

“We selected Open-Silicon because they bring years of experience in getting working silicon to market” said Ravi Iyengar, CEO of CoinTerra Inc. “When you are designing ASICs at the 2Xnm node and below, you need a partner like Open-Silicon who has completed over 300 ASIC solutions, shipped more than 75 million ASICs, and has an outstanding track record of meeting their committed schedules on time.”

“Our expertise and years of experience are well aligned with CoinTerra’s technical needs,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, President & CEO of Open-Silicon, Inc. “It is great to work with a company that understands its market and thinks far ahead about their needs and requirements in order to achieve their short-term and long-term goals, ” said Dr. Sherwani.

/Sarcasm on: Oh they chose Open -Silicon! YAY ! /Sarcasm off

Who the Hell is open-silicon? I mean, it's just another company name.
Does not help at all to make this look a bit more legit.

[fiktionist]

Exciting, looks like amateur hour is almost over.

Might miss this on their website, but CoinTerra has partnered with Open-Silicon for their ASIC design:
http://www.cointerra.com/cointerra-selects-open-silicon-for-next-generation-bitcoin-asics/

-----------------------
CoinTerra selects Open-Silicon for next generation BitCoin ASICs

July 24, 2013 Austin, TX. – CoinTerra, a company leading the next wave of silicon-based BitCoin mining, today announced that it has selected Open-Silicon as their ASIC design and development partner. Selecting Open-Silicon paves the way forward to building the highest-performing hashing ASICs available in the market, which consume only a fraction of the power consumed by other mining ASICs.

CoinTerra’s world-class expertise in ASIC architecture combined with Open-Silicon’s track record in ASIC solutions – including design and manufacturing – is a dynamic blend, which will soon result in bringing the most advanced bitcoin mining products to market.

“We selected Open-Silicon because they bring years of experience in getting working silicon to market” said Ravi Iyengar, CEO of CoinTerra Inc. “When you are designing ASICs at the 2Xnm node and below, you need a partner like Open-Silicon who has completed over 300 ASIC solutions, shipped more than 75 million ASICs, and has an outstanding track record of meeting their committed schedules on time.”

“Our expertise and years of experience are well aligned with CoinTerra’s technical needs,” said Dr. Naveed Sherwani, President & CEO of Open-Silicon, Inc. “It is great to work with a company that understands its market and thinks far ahead about their needs and requirements in order to achieve their short-term and long-term goals, ” said Dr. Sherwani.

/Sarcasm on: Oh they chose Open -Silicon! YAY ! /Sarcasm off

Who the Hell is open-silicon? I mean, it's just another company name.
Does not help at all to make this look a bit more legit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon

just read. Open Silicon is not a "small fly".

[yottahash]

/Sarcasm on: Oh they chose Open -Silicon! YAY ! /Sarcasm off

Who the Hell is open-silicon? I mean, it's just another company name.
Does not help at all to make this look a bit more legit.

Open-Silicon was founded in 2003. Founder Dr. Naveed Sherwani's idea was to select best-in-class technology from the open market and apply it through an engineering process focused on three goals: low cost, high schedule predictability, and high reliability. Initial funding was provided by Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, and InterWest Partners.

Additional funding from those partners, and new partners Artis Capital and Bridgescale Partners, brought the total venture funding in four rounds of financing to almost $46M. In December 2007 Unicorn Investment Bank acquired 75% of Open-Silicon for $190M, with the rest of the company employee-owned.

In May 2007, Open-Silicon acquired Zenasis Technologies, a maker of processor optimization EDA software. This technology has become the core of Open-Silicon's MAX Technologies. This technology has also been expanded by Open-Silicon to focus on low power design and process variability management.

In 2008 and 2009, Open-Silicon received the "Most Respected Private Semiconductor Company" Award from the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA).

In 2009 Open-Silicon acquired design services firm Silicon Logic Engineering (SLE). This acquisition has enhanced the company's derivative IC design capabilities. In 2010 the company opened new facilities in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and Pune, India, to provide additional support for derivative IC design.

In 2012, Open-Silicon acquired and grew substantial design operations in Pakistan and Taiwan.