瑞士Bitmine系列报道之一：28nm的狂野西部
瑞士Bitmine系列报道之二：经过Avalon、BitFury之后，Bitmine将带来4P算力
2013年8月8日：Bitmine启用彩云比特官方账号，Bitmine官网通知如下：Bitmine’s Representatives Will Be Holding a Series of Press Conferences and Answering Chinese Customers’ Questions on
www.cybtc.com Dedicated Bitmine Forum in Real Time using Usernames Bitmine1 and Bitmine2
对Bitmine中国客户的重要告示：
瑞士Bitmine矿机公司代表将在彩云比特（
www.cybtc.com）论坛Bitmine专区进行一系列论坛实时答疑活动。瑞士Bitmine矿机代表彩云比特论坛用户名分别为Bitmine1和Bitmine2.
以下内容转自2013年8月28日coindesk的报道：Bitmine to drop 4PH/s of ASIC power onto bitcoin network
Published on August 27, 2013 at 16:25 BST | By Danny Bradbury | Companies, Mining, News, Technology
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A Hong Kong-based investment company is ramping up an ASIC mining hardware business that will drop four Petahashes (PH/s) of computing power onto the network by the end of March.
Massive Luck Investments, domiciled in Hong Kong but registered in the British Virgin Islands, has taken a 50% stake in Swiss mining hardware manufacturer Bitmine, (formerly Exion Networks), which has been designing Avalon-based mining hardware. The new venture spans ASIC hardware sales to individual customers, hosted mining, and its own private mining pool.
Massive Luck Investments, which has offices in places including Manila and the UK, is a relatively new entrant to the bitcoin space. The firm, which also has operations in traditional gold and copper mining and rare earth metals, decided to get into digital mining after evaluating new market opportunities earlier this year. With Bitmine, it is buying existing ASICs from other manufacturers while also preparing to fabricate its own through a partnership with fabrication giant Global Foundries.
A senior spokesperson for Massive Luck, who asked not to be named, said:
“We had a board meeting which put together a small research group, tasked with making an initial assessment of business opportunities in the fledgling digital currency area. The team presented its report in early January, and the report identified the digital currencies as a potential area of disruptive technological breakthroughs, and a very promising investment opportunity.”
betcoin dice
Image: Betcoin Dice
In February, Massive Luck decided to pursue digital currency as an opportunity in three areas: mining hardware, gaming, and the integration of digital currencies and traditional financial infrastructure. It has already started its bitcoin gaming operation, BetCoin ™ Dice, separately to its Bitmine venture. It hopes to steal significant market share from Satoshi Dice with the gaming operation.
The Bitmine ASIC mining hardware venture is pursuing three broad areas: retail equipment sales, hosted mining, and a private multi-Petahash mining operation. It will progress through three generations of ASIC chips in relatively rapid succession, starting with Avalon chips.
The Avalon OEM community has been a small but frustrated one. BitSynCom, the company behind the 110nm chip, has been promising supplies for months, with significant delays. However, last week, it said it is now shipping 40,000 each day. Tens of thousands went to Zefir, a Swiss party who organized a group purchase. Bitmine CEO Giorgio Massarotto drove to Zefir to pick up between 37,500 and 40,000 chips over the weekend – that equates to around 16TH/sec of capacity.
This is just the first in three generations of chips that Bitmine will use, however. The second generation of ASICs on its timeline come from BitFury. They are built to a 55nm process and selling for $20 per GH/sec, and are designed using a process called fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI). These chips will provide 2.5-3GH/sec per chip at 0.5-0.75W/GH. It will put 16 on a board.
“We plan to deploy it in four different configurations: 5, 10, 20, and 40 cards per unit, or roughly 250, 500, 1,000, and 2,000 GH/sec,” said the Massive Lucky exec.
The third generation ASIC, labeled CoinCraft, will be a 28nm in-house effort. It has been co-designed by a number of players, including Synapse, Innosilicon, and Verisilicon. The chip is built to scale with bitcoin network difficulty, by operating in three modes.
“When the difficulty level is relatively low (the first 4-5 months of the life cycle) it can be set to TURBO mode, mining at 40GH/chip, 0.75W/GH,” said the spokesperson. “As the difficulty increases, it can be adjusted to the REGULAR mode, mining at 30GH/chip, 0.5W/GH.” Finally, as difficulty scales, the chip can throttle back to a 20Gh ultra-low power mode at 0.35w/chip.
This chip will cost $6.8/GH in fully assembled boxes, which like the Avalon and Bitfury boxes will be available directly to end-users. Bitmine will take delivery of 100,000 of these chips from Global Foundry in November, giving it 4 Petahashes of power (not including the BitFury chips).
It expects to ship 1-1.5 Petahashes of power to customers who want to run the boxes themselves. However, this is really a chip for the cloud, as it enables the firm to dynamically adjust power consumption in a large-scale computing operation, and that’s where the other 2.5-3 Petahashes of power is going.
That’s where the Asian datacenter and a $14m, 1.8 Megawatt supercomputer comes in.
computerMassive Luck Investments and Bitmine are jointly building a data center in China that will host mining power using the third-generation chips. That facility, which will cost just under $1 million for basic physical construction, will be finished around February, although it will start hosting CoinCraft processors in small quantities in December.
Massive Luck may mobilize the entire 5,000 workforce of one of its companies, Cutting Edge, to work in three shifts around the clock to assemble all mining units within a week or so in January. Around 0.5 Petahashes of CoinCraft computing power will be hosted for customer use.
The supercomputer comes later. Actually, there are two of them, built under an agreement with the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. One of them, to be delivered in Q4 2014, will cost $12m to build, and will offer CPU power designed for data modeling tasks (the normal things that academics do with supercomputers). Massive Luck Investments gets “certain subsidies and exemptions” in return for its help, because the Chinese government badly needs supercomputing power.
“The Chinese government provides preferential policies to attract FDI [foreign direct investment] in certain high tech areas that benefit the Chinese economy,” said the Massive Luck exec. “They require traditional CPU-based traditional computing power to address the acute shortage of it. Shanghai supercomputer center will be responsible for the overall facility design and staff training.”
However, the other supercomputer is scheduled for installation in March at the Bitmine/Massive Luck data center, and it’s where the firm’s 2PH of remaining ASIC hash power will go. This will cost $14m including the cost of the building, and the materials and labour for installing the equipment in the datacenter. However, the spokesperson says that Massive Luck owns and controls all of that power, promising that the Chinese government won’t be able to begin manipulating the market with it.
It isn’t clear whether the firm will fabricate more CoinCraft chips after this. A lot depends on market variables such as bitcoin pricing and what other ASIC vendors are doing.
“We’re following the CoinTerra developments very closely,” said the Massive Luck insider. “This is a dark horse, so a lot will depend on what they deliver.”
In the meantime, the 800,000 Avalon chips due to hit the market in the next few months are only the start, as mining becomes an increasingly cloud-based venture. Get ready to watch those difficulty charts spike even more this fall.
Image credit: bitmine.ch
Posted In Bitcoin companies
彩云比特中文翻译报道如下： Massive Luck投资公司，在香港办公，在英属维尔京群岛注册，拥有瑞士矿业硬件制造商 Bitmine（官网：
https://bitmine.ch）50％的股权，在今年二月, Massive Luck决定从以下三个方面进军数字货币领域：采矿硬件，游戏，数字货币和传统金融基础设施的整合。
“我们不要玩中本聪的日本骰子，要玩中国人自己的骰子”Massive Luck的发言人说：，他们已经运营的比特币游戏网站包括：
1、财神骰子：中文站：
www.caishenshaizi.com，英文站:
www.betcoindice.tm 2、财神轮盘：中文站：
www.caishenlun.com，英文站:
www.betcoincircle.tm 3、财神堂：中文站：
www.caishentang.com，英文站:
www.betcoin.tm Bitmine的比特币ASIC挖掘硬件业务主要通过以下三方面来开展：设备销售，自主挖掘，私人规模托管。此三方面通过Bitmine的三代矿机来完成。
第一代：Avalon代工：
Avalon的OEM是该公司业务中的一小块。 Avalon使用的是110纳米芯片，看好这个产品几个月，但发货存在明显的延迟问题。不过，上周该公司宣称现在正在以每天40,000片芯片的速度发货。数以万计的芯片都发给了Zefir，他在瑞士方组织了一批购买。Bitmine CEO Giorgio Massarotto开车到Zefir的公司在本周末拿到了37,500至40,000片芯片，算力相当于16TH左右。
第二代：BitFury合作开发：
上述Avalon代工仅是Bitmine三步走中的第一步，Bitmine芯片产业的第二步是和BitFury合作。开发55nm工艺的Asic芯片，销售价将为20美元每GH，这些芯片将提供2.5-3GH/片的算力，功耗在0.5-0.75W/GH，16枚芯片为一个运算卡。
“我们计划将部署四个不同的配置：5片，10片，20片，和40片运算卡的不同级联方式，即大约250，500，1000，2000的GH /秒的不同级联产品” Massive Lucky的exec说。
第三代：CoinCraft自主研发：
第三代专用集成电路ASIC芯片，将叫做CoinCraft，以28nm工艺开发。这个芯片由以下三家公司共同研发，他们是Innosilicon（译者注：总部在中国）、Verisilicon（译者注：总部在芬兰）、Synapse（译者注：总部在法国）
芯片功耗可调整“当难度水平比较低时（第4-5个月的生命周期）可以设置TURBO模式，挖掘在40GH/chip，0.75W/GH，”该发言人表示。 “随着难度的增加，它可以调整到普通模式，开采在0.5W/GH 30GH/chip。”最后，困难时，该芯片可以进入20Gh超低功耗模式，在0.35瓦特/芯片。
这些芯片将会组装成Bitmine第三代产品，整机定价为6.8美元/G，就像Avalon和Bitfury 的机箱类似，用户到手后插电即可使用，Global Foundry(译者注：马来西亚的一家晶原厂）将在今年11月分交货给Bitmine 100,000 28nm芯片，这些芯片将带来4P的算力（不包括Bitmine之前的Bitfury的芯片算力）
预计出货1-1.5P的算力给客户，那些想要自己挖掘的公司或和人。其他2.5-3 P我们将自己部署，功耗的动态调整是一件专业的事情，这就是亚洲的数据中心和1400万美元，1.8兆瓦的超级计算中心的用武之地。
数字货币超级计算中心：
Massive Luck投资公司和Bitmine共同建立一个数据中心，在中国将采用第三代28nm芯片。该设施将花费100万美元以下的基建费用，将于明年2月左右完成，在12月将开始使用少量的CoinCraft处理器。
Massive Luck 集团将调动整个公司约5000名员工，工作三班倒日夜不停组装一个星期左右，在1月内所将提供0.5P左右的CoinCraft芯片算力矿机为客户托管。
这个超级数字货币计算中心将位于上海超级计算中心，在2014年第四季度交付，将耗资1200万美元打造。Massive Luck投资公司将得到一定的补贴和豁免，“提供帮助的回报，因为中国政府欢迎超级计算能力”，“中国政府提供的优惠政策，以吸引外国直接投资，外国直接投资在某些高科技领域，有利于中国经济”Massive Luck的exec说。 “他们需要传统的基于CPU的计算能力来解决技术短缺。上海超级计算机中心将负责整体设施的设计和人员培训。”
然而，其他的芯片将部署在Bitmine/Massive Luck自己的超级计算机中心，预计在三月开始安装，这将是公司剩余2P算力将去的地方。这将花费1400万美元，包括建设成本，设备安装、原材料和劳动力。不过，该发言人说，Massive Luck拥有和控制所有的权力，并承诺，中国政府将无法通过上海超算中心操纵整个比特币市场。
目前尚不清楚是否在此之后，该公司将制造更多的CoinCraft28nm芯片。这在很大程度上取决于Bitcoin的定价和其他ASIC厂商正在做什么等带来的市场变数。
黑马和难度飙升：
“我们一直紧跟比特币发展的大环境”Massive Luck透露。 “这将是一匹黑马，这很多将取决于他提供什么。”
在此期间，在接下来的几个月中将有800,000片Avalon芯片进入市场，这仅仅是个开始，比特币挖掘将成为越来越多的基于云计算规模企业的业务。今年秋天可能会看到那些挖矿困难图表秒杀性的增长。
（彩云比特注：上述内容由coindesk头条翻译得来，真实性还有待验证，但辛苦的矿工们对难度的估算要注意了）
