CoinTerra announces its first ASIC - Hash-Rate greater than 500 GH/s

[Puppet]

We are indeed on track for our delivery times. Mock tape-out was performed and our tape out is very near. The community can expect more information soon as we get closer to production.

FWIW, hashfast claimed to have done their mock tape out well before august 20th:
https://hashfast.com/countdown-to-tapeout/

2 months later they are still several weeks from shipping.

Ill take your claims of shipping in december with at least the same amount of salt I took with HF's october claims and KnC's september claims. Lets just hope we dont need butterfly quantities of salt.

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[iCEBREAKER]

We are indeed on track for our delivery times. Mock tape-out was performed and our tape out is very near. The community can expect more information soon as we get closer to production.

Mock tape-out was weeks ago, and still no real one?  Hashfast went from mock to actual tape-out in about 9 days.

Something went wrong with Cointerra's mock tape-out.  Probably because they can't code RTL for shit.

This is where amateur Cointerra's lack of experience with designing a new chip from scratch shows.  Maybe they'll get it right In Two Weeks^tm.   

Building a huge Bitcoin ASIC from the ground up is completely different than buying some IP from ARM, etc. and slapping it onto a SOC for Samsung phones.

Let's remember Cointerra made claims about its chip's physical performance in GH/W/sec before getting remotely close to physical simulation.

There is no way in Hell Cointerra can make its promised December delivery date on time, any more than they met their "first week of Oct" tape-out target.

[SysRun]

hey cointerra, your website is broken.

[cointerra]

hey cointerra, your website is broken.

Thank you for the notification. We are working on a couple things on the back end and adding additional features, so the site should be back up and fully functional soon.

Regards,
CoinTerra Support

[VolanicEruptor]

so if someone wants to get a refund for a $6,000 machine, would the refund value be based on BTC or fiat?   

[ImI]

so if someone wants to get a refund for a $6,000 machine, would the refund value be based on BTC or fiat?   

lol! dude, you serious?!

[VolanicEruptor]

so if someone wants to get a refund for a $6,000 machine, would the refund value be based on BTC or fiat?   

lol! dude, you serious?!

yes

[mitty]

so if someone wants to get a refund for a $6,000 machine, would the refund value be based on BTC or fiat?   

I'd assume fiat since they use Bitpay (and the prices on their site are in USD).

[cointerra]

We are indeed on track for our delivery times. Mock tape-out was performed and our tape out is very near. The community can expect more information soon as we get closer to production.

FWIW, hashfast claimed to have done their mock tape out well before august 20th:
https://hashfast.com/countdown-to-tapeout/

2 months later they are still several weeks from shipping.

Ill take your claims of shipping in december with at least the same amount of salt I took with HF's october claims and KnC's september claims. Lets just hope we dont need butterfly quantities of salt.

There are quite a few factors that weight in to the time between mock-tape out and the tape-out itself. Depending on how much information you supply for the mock-tape out there does not have to be a significant time laps between mock tape-out, tape-out and production.

You can expect tape-out announcement soon and we are indeed still on time table for our production.

[Adeel06]

There are quite a few factors that weight in to the time between mock-tape out and the tape-out itself. Depending on how much information you supply for the mock-tape out there does not have to be a significant time laps between mock tape-out, tape-out and production.

You can expect tape-out announcement soon and we are indeed still on time table for our production.

That's good to hear.

One thing I think your customers deserve is a 9-5 customer service representative whom they can speak to. I mean, we have invested 1000's of dollars. 
KnCMiner provided this to their customers, and although I am sure they received hundreds of calls per day, it put all of their investors at ease, which results in positivity regarding your name (something BFL knows nothing about).

Just my BTC.02

[cointerra]

There are quite a few factors that weight in to the time between mock-tape out and the tape-out itself. Depending on how much information you supply for the mock-tape out there does not have to be a significant time laps between mock tape-out, tape-out and production.

You can expect tape-out announcement soon and we are indeed still on time table for our production.

That's good to hear.

One thing I think your customers deserve is a 9-5 customer service representative whom they can speak to. I mean, we have invested 1000's of dollars.  
KnCMiner provided this to their customers, and although I am sure they received hundreds of calls per day, it put all of their investors at ease, which results in positivity regarding your name (something BFL knows nothing about).

Just my BTC.02

Hello,
Thank you for your input. We do have customer service staffed well beyond 9-5 and they are more than happy to call you back if you contact us. Just send an email to support@cointerra.com and our CR team will happily call you back asap.

[nuggium]

I've called CoinTerra customer support a few times now. First couple times I actually got a live human being on the phone. His name was John and was quite helpful in converting my Dec order into 2x Jan orders and refunding the difference back to me. A week later I called and left a VM. Surprisingly, I actually got a call back the same day!

I'm so used to getting terrible customer service from ASIC companies. It is quite refreshing to find good customer service for once! Of course I'll feel better once the miners get delivered, but good communication goes a long way in my book. Kudos to John from customer service!

[Ytterbium]

LOL. You dont really believe that do you? You can buy barebone PCs which contain far more PCB, cables, connectors and stuff for $150 in retail. A liquid cooling kit from Intel costs $45 retail.

Of course you can buy a barebones PC for cheaper.  but we're not talking about a PC here.  A PC doesn't hash at the performance we want.   We're talking something 500-1000 times faster at hashing than the fastest PC you can buy.   Youre living in fantasy land if you think 'cheap' pc components are whats inside cointerra's box.   While i think youre on the right track with pc components, i think you have aimed very low on the spec.

For a start, every 28nm asic company's hashing chips run a lot hotter than any Intel chip.   And in this box we're talking 4 hot chips, not just one thats in a PC.   Intel's $45 liquid cooling is designed for 125 watts TDP.  Presumably its got a bit of extra margin in it, but its not designed for the 250-350 watts that the cointerra chips will be putting out - 24/7 in the bitcoin hashing world.  You'd need industrial strength liquid cooling not just cheapo liquid cooling.   Intel's not a purveyor of the best cooling solutions and never has been.  For those, you need to buy from specialist third parties. like CoolIT and AseTek (who make the Corsair and NZXT liquid cooling systems for instance)

Then there's the power supply - another expensive thing you underestimated.  Add up 4 hot chips running at say 300+ watts... And you get to what?  1200 watts minimum?  And what if we want to overclock them?.. Shall we allow for up to 1600 watts?  And what about the other stuff thats in there... the fans, pumps, controller and whatever else might be inside?   Shall we say its closer to 2000 watts max?  Or more?   Now look on newegg and find a couple of psu's that delivers that wattage and tell me you can buy them for $50.  Im seeing power supplies in the $300-400 range that deliver that power.  And 4 cooling systems is north of $300 too.  So we're on $600+ and we havnt included a controller nor any fans yet.  Nor a case.   In fact, im not even sure i can buy all the bits that we need for under $1000 (not including cointerra's hashing chips), so in short, youre way off base talking $150 cost.   Do the math!

The components on a PC motherboard do the same things as the components on an ASIC board.  In fact, the ASIC board does even less.  The only difference is the power requirements, but you can split that up into multiple smaller pieces. "500-1000 times faster at hashing" doesn't mean 500-1000 times more actual electricity.

[aerobatic]

The components on a PC motherboard do the same things as the components on an ASIC board.  In fact, the ASIC board does even less.  The only difference is the power requirements, but you can split that up into multiple smaller pieces. "500-1000 times faster at hashing" doesn't mean 500-1000 times more actual electricity.

thats simply not exactly true now is it?   making out that the only difference is the power requirements is making light of a huge issue.  with great power requirements comes great heat and thus great cooling requirements, and great power supply requirements.

 the components on a pc board are to support the intel processor and in general, it runs at a very low wattage most of the time, and is very peaky.  i.e.: it only draws LOTS of power when doing something very taxing.. which is not very often....   whereas the components on a mining rig have to run at full pelt, all of the time, 24/7.  thats a very different demand were making of them.

An Intel chip has a TDP of 125 watts (thats the big ones) and yes you can over clock them band make them run in the hundreds of watts... like 200, maybe even 250 watts max.  The Intel chips never run at 300 watts or 400 watts during normal use.   Sure, there are over clocking crews that make them do that, as one-offs, using liquid nitrogen cooling... but for normal pc use, the intel chip never gets that hot and doesn't need extreme cooling....   whereas, on a mining rig, we're expecting our 'extremely powerful hashing chips' to use 'extremely high amounts of watts' and run 'extremely hot' all of the time... which is why the cooling system for a bitcoin mining rig must have extremely efficient cooling.

Power supply.  so, cointerras 2 TH box... will consume more power than any pc you can buy.   on a pc, it barely uses any power in the pc itself.. like a few hundred watts.   plug in a few top graphics cards and some hard drives and maybe it will consume 750 watts or 1000 at most.  its very rare to find a pc that needs more than 1000 watts... but ok, some of the top pc power supplies are 1200 watts.  you can even buy some that are 1500 watts..  but these aren't the norm...    whereas, we want our mining rigs to run really really fast, and even with extremely efficient power (cointerra claims 0.6W/GH at the chip).. we're not talking a 50 GH butterflylabs thing here... we're talking 2,000 gigahashes!!  that means 1200 watts... then add in the inefficiencies of the power conversion circuits, and the power supply, and the fans and cooling system, and the on board controller board (it has a network connection so there's a pc or single board computer in there) and you're already at over 1500 watts...   and you're already at about the max power that a US household circuit can muster...but then what if you want to over clock or over volt it...?   which probably explains why they're using two 1,000 watt power supplies (and those aren't cheap.. did you look on newegg to see how much those cost!  heck, even the seasonic ones that hashfast is using retail at 250 each and they've got two as well.. I'm sure they're not paying retail prices, but still, these are expensive items)

of course, i expect most of the 2TH machines will be hosted and not in people's homes, unless they live in cold places and want 1500 watts of heat coming out of the fan from a box, 24/7.

Anyway, my point being that yes, you can build high end bitcoin mining rigs out of pc components, but they're the top top top components that are maxed out in performance and they're not the cheap low cost end of the pc component space.

[Puppet]

An Intel chip has a TDP of 125 watts (thats the big ones) and yes you can over clock them band make them run in the hundreds of watts... like 200, maybe even 250 watts max.  The Intel chips never run at 300 watts or 400 watts during normal use.   Sure, there are over clocking crews that make them do that, as one-offs, using liquid nitrogen cooling... but for normal pc use, the intel chip never gets that hot and doesn't need extreme cooling....   whereas, on a mining rig, we're expecting our 'extremely powerful hashing chips' to use 'extremely high amounts of watts' and run 'extremely hot' all of the time... which is why the cooling system for a bitcoin mining rig must have extremely efficient cooling.

Actually, the cooling problem is far greater with CPU's. Overall power consumption per mm² of a cpu may look lower than for a bitcoin chip, but its not, because in a cpu the power consumption (and thus heat) is highly concentrated in a few tiny tiny parts of the cpu. For reference, here is an infrared picture of an Intel cpu:



Basically all the power is consumed in a just a few % of the die, less than 1mm². A bitcoin miner will not have such hotspots and be much more homogeneous.  That makes cooling a lot easier because silicon is not the best heat conductor. Sure you still have to get rid of those 100s of watts, but thats not rocket science when they are spread over a far great area, at least with current designs.

[aerobatic]

An Intel chip has a TDP of 125 watts (thats the big ones) and yes you can over clock them band make them run in the hundreds of watts... like 200, maybe even 250 watts max.  The Intel chips never run at 300 watts or 400 watts during normal use.   Sure, there are over clocking crews that make them do that, as one-offs, using liquid nitrogen cooling... but for normal pc use, the intel chip never gets that hot and doesn't need extreme cooling....   whereas, on a mining rig, we're expecting our 'extremely powerful hashing chips' to use 'extremely high amounts of watts' and run 'extremely hot' all of the time... which is why the cooling system for a bitcoin mining rig must have extremely efficient cooling.

Actually, the cooling problem is far greater with CPU's. Overall power consumption per mm² of a cpu may look lower than for a bitcoin chip, but its not, because in a cpu the power consumption (and thus heat) is highly concentrated in a few tiny tiny parts of the cpu. For reference, here is an infrared picture of an Intel cpu:



Basically all the power is consumed in a just a few % of the die, less than 1mm². A bitcoin miner will not have such hotspots and be much more homogeneous.  That makes cooling a lot easier because silicon is not the best heat conductor. Sure you still have to get rid of those 100s of watts, but thats not rocket science when they are spread over a far great area, at least with current designs.

im not so sure.  a bitcoin mining chip is mostly hashing units, and hashing units have a very high toggle rate (i.e., most of the gates change state almost every cycle) ... so i think that almost ALL of a hashing chip is pretty much the maximum power consumptive thing possible.

[Puppet]

im not so sure.  a bitcoin mining chip is mostly hashing units, and hashing units have a very high toggle rate (i.e., most of the gates change state almost every cycle) ... so i think that almost ALL of a hashing chip is pretty much the maximum power consumptive thing possible.

Just do the math. Take hashfast specs; 324mm² 260W = 0.8W per mm².
If you look at that intel cpu, its a ~80mm² die for lets say 100W TDP. You may think that equals 1.25W per mm², but in the hotspots its probably closer to 100x that.

[Gyrsur]

We are indeed on track for our delivery times. Mock tape-out was performed and our tape out is very near. The community can expect more information soon as we get closer to production.

FWIW, hashfast claimed to have done their mock tape out well before august 20th:
https://hashfast.com/countdown-to-tapeout/

2 months later they are still several weeks from shipping.

Ill take your claims of shipping in december with at least the same amount of salt I took with HF's october claims and KnC's september claims. Lets just hope we dont need butterfly quantities of salt.

There are quite a few factors that weight in to the time between mock-tape out and the tape-out itself. Depending on how much information you supply for the mock-tape out there does not have to be a significant time laps between mock tape-out, tape-out and production.

You can expect tape-out announcement soon and we are indeed still on time table for our production.

still waiting patiently for it.

[Gyrsur]

One good way to reassure you customers is to bet you will deliver. It also provides a simple form of insurance for those customers as they can bet No even if they believe in the delivery. You'll even notice that this bet is very lenient, unlike the BitFury bet (which turned out to be a Yes).

problem is fiat vs. BTC. never pay a ASIC producer with BTC. pay only with fiat. if you obey this rule then you will have a large problem if he delivers in time and you did bet with BTC against this.

[Supercomputing]

We are indeed on track for our delivery times. Mock tape-out was performed and our tape out is very near. The community can expect more information soon as we get closer to production.

Mock tape-out was weeks ago, and still no real one?  Hashfast went from mock to actual tape-out in about 9 days.

Something went wrong with Cointerra's mock tape-out.  Probably because they can't code RTL for shit.

This is where amateur Cointerra's lack of experience with designing a new chip from scratch shows.  Maybe they'll get it right In Two Weeks^tm.   

Building a huge Bitcoin ASIC from the ground up is completely different than buying some IP from ARM, etc. and slapping it onto a SOC for Samsung phones.

Let's remember Cointerra made claims about its chip's physical performance in GH/W/sec before getting remotely close to physical simulation.

There is no way in Hell Cointerra can make its promised December delivery date on time, any more than they met their "first week of Oct" tape-out target.

Actually, SHA-2 algorithms are not that difficult to write for hardware, they are very FPGA/ASIC friendly. Any graduate student in Electrical/Electronics Engineering could whip one out in about 3 months or so, I did so back in 2009. The problem that you are going to run into is designing/optimizing for maximum efficiency, and doing so requires additional time and effort. And I believe that Cointerra is 10 times more qualified to do so than I am.

However, I do agree with you that tape-out was expected in September and that did not happen. Now, tape-out might happen towards the end of October, and if it does, there is no way the December delivery is going to happen. Cointerra is going to have about a 65 day window to complete everything and have the hardware at your door step. Not to mention that Quality Assurance (QA) by itself takes a long time for the type of  hardware quality that they are aiming for. I would rather have them to be late than rush and lower their standards such as KnCMiner did. No, no, no, I would rather they delay by a couple of months and deliver high quality products.

The problem I see with Cointerra is not with their Engineering skills, they have the best team for designing Bitcoin mining hardware - their problem is KnCMiner. Why, because a lot of people would rather buy a higher priced miner today, than a lower priced one 3 months from now. They also want the ability to use Credit Cards, PayPal, and have refund options. KnCMiner has all of that going for them because the got in the market first and there was no real competition.

Cointerra started late and the pre-order well is running dry, the other manufactures who got in first drained it. They have to balance funding for research and development, and potential customer refund requests. So how do you deal with that without outright refusing refunds such as what Butterfly Labs and HashFast are doing? I do not know, but I believe this is their major problem. Refuse refunds, and you alienate a big pool of potential customers.

Please Conterra, just come out and say that you are going to be late for December delivery because you cannot rush perfection. Your team will gain more respect and bigger wallets down the road.