What's next after 28 nanometer ASIC bitcoin mining chips? Will outdate soon too?

[colinistheman]

What is the next logical step after 28nm ASIC technology? Is there a smaller, more power-efficient chip technology or is this the best technology out there now?

Would this offer more protection against my hardware becoming obsolete as quickly?

[Trongersoll]

What is the next logical step after 28nm ASIC technology? Is there a smaller, more power-efficient chip technology or is this the best technology out there now?

Would this offer more protection against my hardware becoming obsolete as quickly?

Probably 3 dimensional chips. that seems to be where IBM is headed. Making chips is a photographic processes. the frequency of the beam becomes a limiting factor. I haven't kept up, but i remember that x-ray lithography would be as small as they could get. I don't know if it is being used or not.

People here keep talking about Quantum Computing, i don't know how far away that being practically applied is.

[hyphenx]

28nm should hold up for quite some time, most enhancements will be made through more refined code and power efficiency.
There are 20nm SOC's out there, but I imagine it'd be quite a while before this technology makes it into Bitcoin ASIC's

[phillipsjk]

There was somebody on IRC that claimed they were working on a Quantum simulator that runs on standard computer (thus allowing more Q-bits). I am skeptical of that claim. However that would be about the only technology to increase the mining efficiency by orders of magnitude.

I think long-term, it will be industrial scale mining that makes the biggest returns. I am talking large enough to justify the cost of building a solar power plant in the desert (cooling may be a problem there though).

[DeathAndTaxes]

The next process node would be 22/20nm.  However costs today are much higher per transistor than 28nm.  That combined with a new NRE would make 22/20nm miners uneconomical today.    To date only Intel has released product using 22nm process and Intel doesn't use foundries they built their own custom fabs to their own specs.  It doesn't look like 2014 will change that much.  A couple companies are looking to do some production runs of cellphone chips @ 20nm.  Remember cellphone is a perfect market for this as the higher chip cost isn't really that important but improved battery life is.  General purpose fabrication @ 20nm is probably not going to happen until 2015 and any miner you buy today will either have made a profit or never will long before that.

Things you should be thinking about:
a) Bifury, Avalon, and ASICMiner will move to 28nm eventually.  Bitfury 55nm chip has better efficiency than some 28nm designs.  What will its 28nm design bring.
b) Miners are bad at math.  They may collectively buy hundreds of PH/s of capacity.  So much capacity that collectively miners lose (total hardware cost + total electrical cost < total mining revenue).
c) Lots of room for falling prices @ 28nm.  Raw silicon is likely $0.25 per GH.  The material cost for an entire rig is likely $1 per GH.  That doesn't mean you will see $1 rigs but prices can come down a lot.  

"b" is the one to worry about.  You can't control it so your potential fortunes (or losses) are highly dependent on the actions of someone else who may be utterly clueless. 

If you are still worried about 20nm, remember just because a process node exists doesn't mean it is the cheapest way to produce a chip.  Mining is very capital intensive.  Miners are constantly looking for falling prices not rising prices.  It generally takes two to three years before a new process node becomes cheaper than the prior one.  Worse this process seems to be "slowing down".  The cost improvement when mature from one generation to the next is getting smaller and the time it takes to mature is getting longer.   So it takes more and more years to get a smaller and smaller gain.  These slides are from a presentation where NVidia was "complaining" about TSMC's 28nm process last year but the the general theme is applicable to 20nm and beyond.  Even NVidia (with annual volume in tens of millions of units) doesn't project their cost per transistor on 20nm to beat 28nm until Q1 2015 and 14nm to beat 20nm until Q1 2017.  

[Carlton Banks]

If you are still worried about 20nm, remember just because a process node exists doesn't mean it is the cheapest way to produce a chip.

I would add that the power efficiency improvements that each new level of miniaturisation yields is diminishing. Intel are beginning to play very loose with the power consumption figures for their new processes, and so the genuine scientific merits are becoming increasingly dubious. Maybe someone blazing Intel's trail might improve things in a way they didn't.

Intel's 22nm process was a good example of this. Benchmarkers have not got close to the improvements in power efficiency, thermal efficiency and computational efficiency as Intel's marketing figures (which we now are forced to regard them as)

[domob]

There was somebody on IRC that claimed they were working on a Quantum simulator that runs on standard computer (thus allowing more Q-bits). I am skeptical of that claim. However that would be about the only technology to increase the mining efficiency by orders of magnitude.

That is possible, however the runtime of the quantum code is exponentially larger (in the number of Qubits) on a classical computer than it would be if you had a real quantum computer.  (Otherwise you wouldn't need quantum computers in hardware at all.)  So I don't think it is a practical idea to simulate a quantum computer, unless you only do it for testing your algorithms on very small scales.

[colinistheman]

Awesome, so basically I have a chance to make some bitcoin profit with my 28nm miner assuming it arrives in a timely fashion.

[-ck]

Awesome, so basically I have a chance to make some bitcoin profit with my 28nm miner assuming it arrives in a timely fashion.

If history is anything to go by, no.

b) Miners are bad at math.  They may collectively buy hundreds of PH/s of capacity.  So much capacity that collectively miners lose (total hardware cost + total electrical cost

[colinistheman]

Awesome

[Dalkore]

I am working on an article that will basically make the case they miner has been collectively ruined for most and it will take time for it to play out.  D&T did some interesting hash estimates, I started working those thorough then comparing to hardware while looking at projected difficulty for when they will arrive. 


Hint:  It doesn't look good, to be honest, it is a sad state of affairs. 

[Batshit]

Hint:  It doesn't look good, to be honest, it is a sad state of affairs. 

Doesn't look good for whom?  Those without ASIC boxes?  That's a given already.  I would think the new higher avg hash rates will become the new normal and thus those with the ASIC boxes will do just fine.  Not great, but profitable.

[Dalkore]

Hint:  It doesn't look good, to be honest, it is a sad state of affairs. 

Doesn't look good for whom?  Those without ASIC boxes?  That's a given already.  I would think the new higher avg hash rates will become the new normal and thus those with the ASIC boxes will do just fine.  Not great, but profitable.

No, I'm talking potentially not good for 85-90% of all the miners.  Right now you should assume basically all hashing for the most part is ASIC.

[reactor]

Hint:  It doesn't look good, to be honest, it is a sad state of affairs. 

Doesn't look good for whom?  Those without ASIC boxes?  That's a given already.  I would think the new higher avg hash rates will become the new normal and thus those with the ASIC boxes will do just fine.  Not great, but profitable.

No, I'm talking potentially not good for 85-90% of all the miners.  Right now you should assume basically all hashing for the most part is ASIC.

Yup, the explosion of the mining industry and all the companies bringing hardware online means that all the hash coming online will effectively render itself useless.  The community for mining is basically dead, the big players are the ones suckering other people into buying hardware, the real big players are selling as much BTC as possible and/or inflating the price to dump some mined coin once there is enough of a bottom to cash out nicely.  One whale moves the industry gasps, multiple move and suddenly all the ROI estimates are based on $60 BTC and people are crying themeslves to sleep.  It can happen.

[Tomintx]

Yup, the explosion of the mining industry and all the companies bringing hardware online means that all the hash coming online will effectively render itself useless.  The community for mining is basically dead, the big players are the ones suckering other people into buying hardware, the real big players are selling as much BTC as possible and/or inflating the price to dump some mined coin once there is enough of a bottom to cash out nicely.  One whale moves the industry gasps, multiple move and suddenly all the ROI estimates are based on $60 BTC and people are crying themeslves to sleep.  It can happen.

The profitability curve is so steeply pointed down, that anyone considering to purchase hardware that they cannot put online before the NEXT 1 or 2 difficulty adjustments is crazy. 

We're not talking about Moore's law here.  Moore's law was about one computer.  Doubling performance every 18 months.  Every single chip produced is targeted at the same problem.  If someone produces a dozen wafers of chips, those 10,000 chips are all going to be working together to drive the hash rate skyward.  Mining is more of an e^x type of exponential growth.