Cointerra Mining ASIC coming soon

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Any way to combine two consecutive walls of text into a single megawall of text?

Why dont you give it a try

You're not even trying

[iCEBREAKER]

blah blah blah

and based on the ct specs they are either completely making it up (unlikely), or they have performance the others could only dream of.. and you couldn't accuse them of not being able to code RTL.  What a ridiculous assumption.  And icebreaker claiming that the ct engineers' years of experience designing intel, nvidia, and samsung chips is somehow a negative for them being able to design a bitcoin mining asics, is pure insanity.  and claiming that designing for low power is a simple skill and a disadvantage when designing bitcoin asics... when the whole point about bitcoin hardware is to design for low power & performance.. a difficult balance but one that certainly people who are used to designing for low power will be used to.  The ceo of cointerra is the ex-lead architect of samsung's cpu division - and the samsung galaxy S4 phone is very impressive, especially its cpu (ok, and its oled screen).  some of the other hardware engineers at cointerra came from the graphics chip world, known for their high performance asics and optimised datapaths.  to claim, as icebreaker does, that these guys cant 'write rtl code worth shit'... shows how far removed from the truth the guy is - and if not insane, just a troll with a huge chip on his shoulder and a penchant for overzealous untruths.    whats he scared of?  that cointerra might actually deliver what theyve promised?   they sure have a lot to live up to... the spec theyve 'promised us' is significantly faster, lower power, and way cheaper than any of the other options out there (and, delivered later, its true)...    whether they deliver what they promise - only time will tell!

Time is already telling.  Specifically, the time now (second week of October) versus Cointerra's tape-out target date ("first week of October") is very telling.

I notice you never explain how Cointerra can make physical claims about their chip's GH/W/sec before they have put it into physical simulation.  Maybe you should take on that challenge instead of going for cheap shots at me?

You really dig yourself in by mistakenly including Samsung in your list of actual chip design companies like Intel and nVidia.  Samsung isn't doesn't design CPUs, they simply license IP from ARM, etc and throw the pre-made components together on SOCs.

"ex-lead architect of samsung's cpu division?"  Oh please!  Samsung's Galaxy runs on a CPU designed by ARM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S#Processor

The Samsung Galaxy S used the Samsung S5PC110 processor.  This processor combined a 45 nm 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8 based CPU core with a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU made by Imagination Technologies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A8

The ARM Cortex-A8 is a processor core designed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARM v7 (32-bit) instruction set architecture.

You need to educate yourself on the facts before presuming to correct and daring to scold your superiors.

You really seem incapable of understanding the difference between integrating prebuilt parts for a SOC and designing a new kind of Bitcoin ASIC from scratch.

If Cointerra can write RTL worth shit quickly, why has their tape-out been delayed for over a week?

[aerobatic]

Time is already telling.  Specifically, the time now (second week of October) versus Cointerra's tape-out target date ("first week of October") is very telling.

I notice you never explain how Cointerra can make physical claims about their chip's GH/W/sec before they have put it into physical simulation.  Maybe you should take on that challenge instead of going for cheap shots at me?

I think the point youre missing is that tape-out is the end of the physical design and simulation process but that that you get substantially correct data way before you tape-out.  Once physical design has been finished and layout has been done, you can do power and timings simulations and get pretty accurate data.   Every single other asic company in the bitcoin world has done the same thing.  You dont need to wait til you tape out to get that data.  You get it during the physical design process, weeks before you actually tape-out.

The typical physical design process starts when the rtl is complete and the functional simulation already works.. And takes about 3 months (though knc & hashfast have both proved you can do it in closer to 2 months if you really motivate everyone at the physical design house to work fast and sleep less.).  Cointerra is also trying to do it in less than 3 months... We'll see if they make it.

Btw, im not a complete stranger to silicon design, though its been a long time since ive done it.  My team designed one of the first (possibly The first) gpus, and also an early risc microprocessor that competed with arm, though we didnt alas beat them. Once standardised in a cellphone the rest was history.

And as for being late to tape out... I was aware of the tape-out goals of several of the asic companies, and whether they revealed the dates publically or not, few, if ever, tape-out on the day they expected to.  Things happen, its not an exact science.  Of course i had hoped ct wouldve taped out last week.. But im sure theyre busy trying to make up lost time and tape out just as soon as they can.  Theyre still expecting to deliver systems in december (and seeing as knc did it (well done guys), and hashfast are expecting to do it (fingers crossed), i see no reason why cointerra cant also expect to go from tapeout to actual shipping systems in 2 months as well).  Those guys all paid extra to their fabs to get the 'super rocket runs' or whatever the fab calls it when they charge shitloads extra to make things happen faster.  Literally the fabs employ guys to hand carry the wafers during the mask production phase and move things along much quicker - almost twice as fast - as their regular priced mask layer production.

I just think youre plain wrong to keep writing that cointerra cant design rtl worth shit.  Its insane.  Ct has a chip spec that thats more GH per die mm than any of the others, and that didnt happen by accident.  Maybe it took them too much extra time to optimise the circuitry so much better than the others.. Maybe that was time wasted when they couldve been shipping earlier like the others are... But instead, ct's differentiator is that they'll have a very efficient chip.  And of course i wouldve liked to see it hashing weeks sooner, but i also dont only intend to hash with it for a week or two, but will have it switched on for perhaps the whole year... So i want it to be the fastest gh's, for the fewest dollars, and use the lowest KwH... And i think the extra time ct spent optimising the design will have longterm payback.

Sorry crumbs for another wall!

[DPoS]

2TH in Jan is like having a couple Avalons right now

They'd have to sell 20TH for $5,000 to get anyone to sign up now for Jan

[testerx]

Any updates on this?  If they don't tape out soon there's no way the December units are going to ROI.  What's with the complete lack of updates?

[Paladin69]

Any updates on this?  If they don't tape out soon there's no way the December units are going to ROI.  What's with the complete lack of updates?

2TH by December is probably going to make a little over 1 btc per day at the rate this thing is climbing.  A lot of people are going to get crushed by all of these companies.

[DPoS]

Any updates on this?  If they don't tape out soon there's no way the December units are going to ROI.  What's with the complete lack of updates?

2TH by December is probably going to make a little over 1 btc per day at the rate this thing is climbing.  A lot of people are going to get crushed by all of these companies.

luckily this one doesn't really exist

hashfast is kinda a wish on a star as well

[maursader]

So what's the deal:

1. Is this company legit?
2. What do you suspect the BTC mining output will be for the DEC/JAN shipments?

I'm thinking the opinions are pretty wishy washy.

[DPoS]

So what's the deal:

1. Is this company legit?
2. What do you suspect the BTC mining output will be for the DEC/JAN shipments?

I'm thinking the opinions are pretty wishy washy.

seems like venture capital greater fool game here

it'll end with someone taking a big tax writeoff

[cointerra]

Any updates on this?  If they don't tape out soon there's no way the December units are going to ROI.  What's with the complete lack of updates?

The mock-tape out is already made and we will be taping out shortly. Everyone can expect reports closer together in the near future as we get closer to chip production and other major events. We are still very much on track for our presented delivery time.

[cointerra]

So what's the deal:

1. Is this company legit?
2. What do you suspect the BTC mining output will be for the DEC/JAN shipments?

I'm thinking the opinions are pretty wishy washy.

1. We are very much 'legit' and have an office in Austin as listed on our website. We have recently had several people drop by our office to say hello and meet our team.
2. Without speculating in exact BTC output, it stands to argue that whoever mines with the highest hash-rate/power consumption ratio will see ROI for quite some time as older and less profitable miners leave the network. Of course Diff cannot exponentially increase past what any hardware can profitably mine, as was seen when GPU made CPU mining obsolete and now with ASIC making GPU mining obsolete.

[donch]

2. Without speculating in exact BTC output, it stands to argue that whoever mines with the highest hash-rate/power consumption ratio will see ROI for quite some time as older and less profitable miners leave the network. Of course Diff cannot exponentially increase past what any hardware can profitably mine, as was seen when GPU made CPU mining obsolete and now with ASIC making GPU mining obsolete.

This is true provided the batch "with the highest hash-rate/power consumption ratio" is delivered quickly as a whole, with the batch size being limited to a reasonable quantity.

BFL messed up in this regard in both respects. They delivered their queue slowly, thereby leaving most reward to those at the start of the queue. They also oversold their single batch at two stages of pricing, knowing that those at the end of the queue would never see a return.

Your statement may prove true for some of your customers, but can you guarantee it for all?

[cointerra]

2. Without speculating in exact BTC output, it stands to argue that whoever mines with the highest hash-rate/power consumption ratio will see ROI for quite some time as older and less profitable miners leave the network. Of course Diff cannot exponentially increase past what any hardware can profitably mine, as was seen when GPU made CPU mining obsolete and now with ASIC making GPU mining obsolete.

This is true provided the batch "with the highest hash-rate/power consumption ratio" is delivered quickly as a whole, with the batch size being limited to a reasonable quantity.

BFL messed up in this regard in both respects. They delivered their queue slowly, thereby leaving most reward to those at the start of the queue. They also oversold their single batch at two stages of pricing, knowing that those at the end of the queue would never see a return.

Your statement may prove true for some of your customers, but can you guarantee it for all?

It is our belief that offering high hash-rate at lowest possible power consumption will be profitable until 3rd Gen ASIC, due to the fact that at a certain point only the miners with the lowest power consumption per GH/s will be able to provide ROI.

Thus less profitable miners will to a large extent stop mining and difficulty will adjust to a point where just as it was true for CPU/GPU and soon Gen 1 ASIC profitability will be assured only with the latest generation of ASIC miners.

Since the TerraMiner series will lead the Gen 2 ASIC technology race when it comes to hash power per kW/h we believe our customers will enjoy ROI for quite some time.

[amencon]

we believe our customers will enjoy ROI for quite some time.

You might want to qualify this statement.  If you mean to say that you believe most of your customers will have a long period of mining where the electricity cost to mine a BTC is lower than he cost to buy on an exchange then you aren't really addressing whether or not your customers will "ROI" on their investment in your product (i.e. Mine as much BTC or more as they spent to purchase the gear).

I'd suspect most of your potential customers (me included) aren't very interested in how long they can make a cent a day but whether or not they will end up making money over the life of machine vs what they spent.

This is a bit of a trick question though as you shouldn't attempt and can't tell your customers how profitable they will be as there are factors involved outside your control.  My advise is to avoid making responses of this nature whatsoever as it comes across as naive at best and disingenuous or fraudulent at worst.

[DPoS]

I'd suspect most of your potential customers (me included) aren't very interested in how long they can make a cent a day but whether or not they will end up making money over the life of machine vs what they spent.

that's the whole point of selling miners..   If they bothered to do all this on their own dime, and mine until they have to shut them off, they would probably come out negative as well.

Since they get to sell everyone the dream, up front, they get their ROI.

And we already had one company (ASICminer) that was able to do same day orders, but you saw that the true price of mining is more than the much bandied about mantra of 'get more BTC than you spend' ROI.

So surely there are other factors out there that drive up the price that people still will pay for miners that will not produce the same BTC they paid.  Many many reasons for that and not only 'because they are dumb and don't know how to use genesis block calc'

[amencon]

I'd suspect most of your potential customers (me included) aren't very interested in how long they can make a cent a day but whether or not they will end up making money over the life of machine vs what they spent.

that's the whole point of selling miners..   If they bothered to do all this on their own dime, and mine until they have to shut them off, they would probably come out negative as well.

Since they get to sell everyone the dream, up front, they get their ROI.

And we already had one company (ASICminer) that was able to do same day orders, but you saw that the true price of mining is more than the much bandied about mantra of 'get more BTC than you spend' ROI.

So surely there are other factors out there that drive up the price that people still will pay for miners that will not produce the same BTC they paid.  Many many reasons for that and not only 'because they are dumb and don't know how to use genesis block calc'

The "other factors" seem to mostly be "BTC price might go up and I'll ROI" investment strategies. 

Not disagreeing with you about that being the point of selling miners, just giving them some advice that using disingenuous statements might turn off some potential customers.  Then again maybe they'll trick more people than they'll lose.  In the end it's their call which approach to take but those types of comments will definitely give me a pause when considering a purchase from them. 

I'd rather see a marketplace of manufacturers offering honest bad investments rather than using duplicitous language to rope dummies in.

[DPoS]

there are quite a few

one example would be group buys.  The one running the group buy, pads his ROI by providing the service and getting paid for that.  And many in the group may not want to deal with running a miner, or getting bitcoins through exchanges or wherever. Since they are small player, they look at it more like a fee to getting bitcoins, etc

And think of the people who get to fudge with corporate budgets..  have you been around big corp purchase orders?  You think it is hard to add $20,000 as 'blahblah servers' on a half million budget and then stash them somewhere in a datacenter for free electricity?  Do you know many of the things big corp buys do not even get out of the boxes they were shipped in?  Projects that die but items still bought?

Step back and see everyone who is in this game

[maursader]

Is there any way to predict what the hash rates will be in January when Cointerra is expected to ship these 1TH/s and 2TH/s units? I'm considering buying one, and I'm looking for reasons to either buy it, or not buy it. Please help me out here, I'm on the fence, and it's pretty painful. Should I expect that it's gonna be worth it? or not?

Cheers.

[Paladin69]

Is there any way to predict what the hash rates will be in January when Cointerra is expected to ship these 1TH/s and 2TH/s units? I'm considering buying one, and I'm looking for reasons to either buy it, or not buy it. Please help me out here, I'm on the fence, and it's pretty painful. Should I expect that it's gonna be worth it? or not?

Cheers.

A 550 GH Jupiter right now only earns 1 btc per day.  The next difficulty will drop that to less than 0.7 btc per day.

I shutter to think what 2TH will make by December and January.  That is many difficulty changes away.

[amencon]

there are quite a few

one example would be group buys.  The one running the group buy, pads his ROI by providing the service and getting paid for that.  And many in the group may not want to deal with running a miner, or getting bitcoins through exchanges or wherever. Since they are small player, they look at it more like a fee to getting bitcoins, etc

And think of the people who get to fudge with corporate budgets..  have you been around big corp purchase orders?  You think it is hard to add $20,000 as 'blahblah servers' on a half million budget and then stash them somewhere in a datacenter for free electricity?  Do you know many of the things big corp buys do not even get out of the boxes they were shipped in?  Projects that die but items still bought?

Step back and see everyone who is in this game

Sure these all might be factors for a handful of people here and there.  Interesting about the corporate budget angle, hadn't thought of that.

None of this really has much to do with my original point of the somewhat sneaky use of the word ROI in Cointerra's comment and it's possible effect on potential buyers though.

The fact there are some minority of purchasers that buy full well knowing they will likely not ROI, shouldn't give ASIC manufacturers carte blanche to make any claims they want.