Official BITMINE CoinCraft series 28nm ASIC miners thread

[georgem]

I do also work in a Swiss company, and there nobody cares about (public) Holidays if things go south.
And being late three weeks with actually no evidence of any light at the end of the tunnel (no update about the chips, no gui previews, just nothing) is pretty much messing things up.
As CEO I would really wory about my reputation - or just have to life with the fact, that my company is as bad as any other currently in the market out there. So nothing about swiss quality and puncuality.

After two or three longer phone calls, I thought I heard them say that part of the assembly is done in north italy, and NOT in swizerland. (but sorry I am really not sure I maybe misunderstood that)

Official headquarters of bitmine.ch is located in the southern part of swiss. What they call "italian switzerland". They speak italian there as you know.

Hm, I don't want to spread any FUD... but I am not sure about anything anymore.

Too many unknown parameters to make an educated guess.

Where is the hardware? Is it really assembled in switzerland?
Who creates the software? Has it not been created yet?
At this moment there is not even a draft of the basic software functionality available as screenshot?  

We have nice 3d renderings of the rigs, alright.    

[Min€r]

I do also work in a Swiss company, and there nobody cares about (public) Holidays if things go south.
And being late three weeks with actually no evidence of any light at the end of the tunnel (no update about the chips, no gui previews, just nothing) is pretty much messing things up.
As CEO I would really wory about my reputation - or just have to life with the fact, that my company is as bad as any other currently in the market out there. So nothing about swiss quality and puncuality.

After two or three longer phone calls, I thought I heard them say that part of the assembly is done in north italy, and NOT in swizerland. (but sorry I am really not sure I maybe misunderstood that)

Official headquarters of bitmine.ch is located in the southern part of swiss. What they call "italian switzerland". They speak italian there as you know.

Hm, I don't want to spread any FUD... but I am not sure about anything anymore.

Too many unknown parameters to make an educated guess.

Where is the hardware? Is it really assembled in switzerland?
Who creates the software? Has it not been created yet?
At this moment there is not even a draft of the basic software functionality available as screenshot?  

We have nice 3d renderings of the rigs, alright.    

I got an Avalon Clone some month ago. The production was always in Italy - this was same with the Avalons but they are running & the work seems really good they did there. I guess the software is some simple linux implemented autostart cgminer with apache for the webinterface - so it should not be a big thing at all. Look at the KNC webinterface - it`s too a simple thing & nothing special.

About all other things.... all isn`t clear anymore - why do the chips ever have to leave Germany or EU? Can`t you find a fu**ing packaging company here when chips are produced locally & finally where are the chips from November (Dezember batch) - as one of their early clients I still calculate 3. Dezember as delievery date like they stated in their blog.

Code:

We are also perfectly on schedule for December delivery as we have agreements already in place with the foundry for the first run of production and our slots are already confirmed.

Code:

A new page has been turned yesterday in the Bitcoin mining history, as Innosilicon -  a global leader in high speed mixed signal design and the strategic IP partner selected by Bitmine to develop their advanced CoinCraft A1 28nm ASIC mining chip core  – sent to Global Foundries the GDS data for the tape out process that will eventually lead to the delivery of the first lot of ASICs in the last week of November 2013.

Code:

In the meantime, the pre-order queue will be the only available option and the shipping queue will continue to be filled till we reach the limits of our production capacity, although 95% of all deliveries will commence between December 3rd and December 17th. 

Funny thing again, no ASIC manufacter actually delievers and the difficulty explode    

[RetroGamer]

Code:

In the meantime, the pre-order queue will be the only available option and the shipping queue will continue to be filled till we reach the limits of our production capacity, although 95% of all deliveries will commence between December 3rd and December 17th. 

[/b]

and unfortunately starts the shit
most one customer wrote that is started with the production until 16/12/2013 and 10 units a day are made

[zefir]

Miners and Bitmine customers,

before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.

Aside from being their largest customer, I work for Bitmine as a contractual consultant at the SW side. As such, I am in direct contact with the management and also regularly visit their offices. While doing PR on the forums is not part of my contract, I dislike the current sentiment where speculation and misinformation dominate. Still, I am under NDA and therefore can only sum up what is already publicly known or not covered by the NDA.

Chips
Believe it or not: there is no chip packaging facility in Europe. Therefore, the wafers produced by GF in Dresden were sent to China for packaging and will be returned back to Switzerland for testing / assembly.

Software
As announced here, I was supplied with an FPGA chip emulator to develop a cgminer SPI driver for the A1. The initial version was released some days ago, and with that, there is a tool available to mine with the A1 as soon as the chips are assembled. On top of that base functionality, the features currently being worked on are

• support for clusters of autonomous chip chains for modularity
• un-brickable FW upgrade to mature SW in the field
• user-defined / auto balance of hashrate vs. power consumption
• GUI

This list is sorted after priorities, and a GUI is obviously not on its top. I personally am fine to have the GUI provided by cgminer's miner.php, but there will also be a 'polished' Web-UI available.
 
Assembly
As already done with the Avalon clones, PCBs are assembled in north Italy and the PCBAs are delivered to Switzerland for product assembly and QA. During my last visit I saw around a dozen workplaces - production capacity should be therefore closer to 50 than to 10 units/day.

Misc FUD
To state the obvious: a) there are no A1 chips available - nowhere in the world, and consequently b) Bitmine is not mining with customer's rig.


Hope this helps to limit the current speculation. Please understand that I can't be more specific than this, but I am quite confident that we will hear significant news from Bitmine officials soon.


Happy New Year,
zefir

[intron]

Miners and Bitmine customers,

before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.
.
.
.
Happy New Year,
zefir

Hi zefir,

Any news on the “Best board design” contest as mentioned here?:

http://bitmine.ch/?p=1914

"At the same time, the “Best board design” contest will be announced and feature several
open-source minded developers and engineers for the most innovative mining board design,
with prizes for the winners that include Bitcoin rewards and free CoinCraft A1 chips."

And will there be samples available for people that
want to make there own boards?

Thanks inadvance and HNY also:)

intron

[stevebrowne]

Thanks Zefir, much appreciated - you should feedback to BitMine that they need to do this kind of thing more often to stop the FUD growing.

[georgem]

Funny thing again, no ASIC manufacter actually delievers and the difficulty explode    

There is one upsetting reason that can explain that. /FUD

[georgem]

Miners and Bitmine customers,

before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.

Aside from being their largest customer, I work for Bitmine as a contractual consultant at the SW side. As such, I am in direct contact with the management and also regularly visit their offices. While doing PR on the forums is not part of my contract, I dislike the current sentiment where speculation and misinformation dominate. Still, I am under NDA and therefore can only sum up what is already publicly known or not covered by the NDA.

Chips
Believe it or not: there is no chip packaging facility in Europe. Therefore, the wafers produced by GF in Dresden were sent to China for packaging and will be returned back to Switzerland for testing / assembly.

Software
As announced here, I was supplied with an FPGA chip emulator to develop a cgminer SPI driver for the A1. The initial version was released some days ago, and with that, there is a tool available to mine with the A1 as soon as the chips are assembled. On top of that base functionality, the features currently being worked on are

• support for clusters of autonomous chip chains for modularity
• un-brickable FW upgrade to mature SW in the field
• user-defined / auto balance of hashrate vs. power consumption
• GUI

This list is sorted after priorities, and a GUI is obviously not on its top. I personally am fine to have the GUI provided by cgminer's miner.php, but there will also be a 'polished' Web-UI available.
 
Assembly
As already done with the Avalon clones, PCBs are assembled in north Italy and the PCBAs are delivered to Switzerland for product assembly and QA. During my last visit I saw around a dozen workplaces - production capacity should be therefore closer to 50 than to 10 units/day.

Misc FUD
To state the obvious: a) there are no A1 chips available - nowhere in the world, and consequently b) Bitmine is not mining with customer's rig.


Hope this helps to limit the current speculation. Please understand that I can't be more specific than this, but I am quite confident that we will hear significant news from Bitmine officials soon.


Happy New Year,
zefir

Thanks for you insight.

I believe a GUI is that much more important since we can't just hook up the device to a computer as if it's a usb-device. We need to access it thru the network. Which makes a gui more important.

Do you agree?

They told me on the phone that I would need to create my own driver if I want to use this device as a usb device.

How will mining altcoins work with the software you develop?

[Min€r]

Miners and Bitmine customers,

before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.

Aside from being their largest customer, I work for Bitmine as a contractual consultant at the SW side. As such, I am in direct contact with the management and also regularly visit their offices. While doing PR on the forums is not part of my contract, I dislike the current sentiment where speculation and misinformation dominate. Still, I am under NDA and therefore can only sum up what is already publicly known or not covered by the NDA.

Chips
Believe it or not: there is no chip packaging facility in Europe. Therefore, the wafers produced by GF in Dresden were sent to China for packaging and will be returned back to Switzerland for testing / assembly.

Software
As announced here, I was supplied with an FPGA chip emulator to develop a cgminer SPI driver for the A1. The initial version was released some days ago, and with that, there is a tool available to mine with the A1 as soon as the chips are assembled. On top of that base functionality, the features currently being worked on are

• support for clusters of autonomous chip chains for modularity
• un-brickable FW upgrade to mature SW in the field
• user-defined / auto balance of hashrate vs. power consumption
• GUI

This list is sorted after priorities, and a GUI is obviously not on its top. I personally am fine to have the GUI provided by cgminer's miner.php, but there will also be a 'polished' Web-UI available.
 
Assembly
As already done with the Avalon clones, PCBs are assembled in north Italy and the PCBAs are delivered to Switzerland for product assembly and QA. During my last visit I saw around a dozen workplaces - production capacity should be therefore closer to 50 than to 10 units/day.

Misc FUD
To state the obvious: a) there are no A1 chips available - nowhere in the world, and consequently b) Bitmine is not mining with customer's rig.


Hope this helps to limit the current speculation. Please understand that I can't be more specific than this, but I am quite confident that we will hear significant news from Bitmine officials soon.


Happy New Year,
zefir

Thanks Zefir!

Amazing the fact with the packaging company.

[Daveb0]

First off all, I really appreciate your view on this, zefir. So don't get me wrong in the following points.

before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.

Thats exactly the point. Since almost three weeks there was not a single (official) reaction from bitmine.
This is was I (and I assume most of the previous posters here) really makes me p***ed off.

Chips
Believe it or not: there is no chip packaging facility in Europe. Therefore, the wafers produced by GF in Dresden were sent to China for packaging and will be returned back to Switzerland for testing / assembly.

Just for your info: Dresden is not in Switzerland so they will not be returned "back to Switzerland"
Just kidding

But back to serious:
since you seem to have more infos than any other (regular) customer I am still not sure which Scenario actually fits the post from giorgiomassa on Dec 10th.

• did they learn about the delay on Dec 10th and the three week delay in packaging has to be measured from then => first packaged chip available on Dec 31st
• did they learn about the delay on Dec 10th and the three week delay in packaging has to be measured from a previous date => why the hell did they not notice before the delay?
• did they learn about the delay before Dec 10th and just did not tell us => *can't find words for that one*

Software
As announced here, I was supplied with an FPGA chip emulator to develop a cgminer SPI driver for the A1. The initial version was released some days ago, and with that, there is a tool available to mine with the A1 as soon as the chips are assembled. On top of that base functionality, the features currently being worked on are

• support for clusters of autonomous chip chains for modularity
• un-brickable FW upgrade to mature SW in the field
• user-defined / auto balance of hashrate vs. power consumption
• GUI

This list is sorted after priorities, and a GUI is obviously not on its top. I personally am fine to have the GUI provided by cgminer's miner.php, but there will also be a 'polished' Web-UI available.

I asked them about a manual or at least a preview.
a) this would increase my confidence into the product, the company and the possibility of on-time-delivery.
b) this should help me, prepare everthing at home, so I can fire off, right after unpackaging my rig.
c) some more detailed specs would have been nice, e.g. if I am right, the power consumption was estimated conservative. So some more precise figures would have been favorable
At the end of November, they assured me, that a Manual and a GUI preview will be available soon.
I assume they have to wait themselves for the Chips for the final release of the Software&manual. However a preview would have been nice how it is planned to look like. But no reaction so far.

Hope this helps to limit the current speculation. Please understand that I can't be more specific than this, but I am quite confident that we will hear significant news from Bitmine officials soon.

As I said at the beginning, their communication to their customers is just bad. Otherwise the would be no room for speculations.
And I also expect "soon" a reaction to my ticket about shifting my updated order back to its original delivery date for more than a week now. And despite the public holdidays, we did have some workdays in between...


Anyhow, I am looking forwards to your optimistic prophecy and expect some good News withing the next feew days - based on giorgiomassas post we still believe, that the january Batches are deliverd on time (which is not equal to an up to 10 day delay without Penalty!)
And there is really no Point in posting in january that the january Batches are delayed. We most probably notice this just by ourselves...


So please, zefir, take this one back to bitmine:

Thanks Zefir, much appreciated - you should feedback to BitMine that they need to do this kind of thing more often to stop the FUD growing.

And while you are talking to them, theres another Thing that makes me angry:
After several times I did Point this out to their customer Support, they still give a shit about the wrong information they state on their Homepage:

• after a full week they at least updated the description of the rig upgrade module from their old 150GHs to the new 250GHs device.
• they still include the old 250GHs Rig configuration in the description - I really do hope that a 0.5THs Rig does not only 0.35THs in turbo mode...
• If I have a rig with 8 modules (=> 2THs nominal power) I would expect 8*350GHs = 3THs in turbo mode and not only 2.8THs how they stated (based on this assumption also all other turbo mode figures are wrong...).

[RetroGamer]

Miners and Bitmine customers,

before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.

@Zefir
@bitmine
Please don't misunderstand but you should know the most as important shit to the avalon are information for customers.
I am a customer of batch 2 avalon - clone miner and had a not insignificant quantity bought equipment that should mean my money already since June when bitmine is parked.
customers who have ordered their units for January or February are probably somewhat quiet only when your money's gone now longer than half a year and to start e.g. gets new promises (cloneminer be replaced by bitfurychips) and then nothing it will return is already frustrated.
It's also not to make bad bitmine!
is now honest but clearly that people are mad if they invest their money and then nothing comes.
I had one other post already explained how much me the delay costs and say is not risk bla bla bla at some point would you reap its fruits
they must also disclose this and not the impression when the project of bitmine is behind the schedule then would raise unless everything in the green zone.
then, perhaps many customers at knc - miner or cointerra would have ordered.
they make regular updates by the who was things
z.b.
http://cointerra.com/?wysija-page=1&controller=email&action=view&email_id=20&wysijap=subscriptions

I had regular E-Mail traffic with Christian Anselmi but came unfortunately not by him more answers.
If you talk to the people of bitmine then please ask them questions:

1. from the date of which is produced?
2. When does the 10% penalty?
3. When are orders with 10% penalty updated? (webshop)
4. I get the 10% per unit or on the complete order?
5. what GH / s the devices really have power
I think these are the important questions and not the nonsensical discus ions about electricity and consumption!


Happy New Year,
RetroGamer

[FrictionlessCoin]

Well at least their packaging the chips.   A little bit ahead of Cointerra,  however it appears cointerra packages in Austin Texas.

Meanwhile, it appears that Hashfast is shipping end of this month!

Also, the 55nm Avalon systems are flooding the market.  On eBay we are seeing sales of 200 GHs systems from Bitmain and another firm from California.

Looks like another major bump in difficulty coming soon!

[RetroGamer]

20 Days without a word of bitmine "for serious miners"

[fubly]

It is really not serious, what they do!

Has anyone replied for an refund?

[tranquille]

Nope. If you entered into a contract you explicitly ruled out your right of stepping back of the contract. For that matter the customer protection plan was brought into life.

Very unprofessional indeed.

[georgem]

A thought I am having:

If I don't get my devices in the beginning of february, but get them two weeks later, I will get not only 10% more hashrate, but effectively 50% more, since their units are only dividable into 200 Ghash or 250 Ghash moduls.
There are no 50 Ghash or 40 Ghash modules. (Other people who ordered a complete unit, will even get an additional unit! Since that is what 10% implies.)  

So in a strange way It would be good for me if they were two weeks too late.

On the other hand, this is completely stupid and naive of me to think like that...

If they have problems fullfilling my initial order, what makes me think they will have even 50% more than that ready only two weeks later?


It's like you owe someone money, and have problems paying back. If you now want to win time by promising to pay back even MORE money... this does obviously increase the problems to pay back what I owe.

It simply makes my problem worse, and doesn't really help anyone, because my chances to go bankrupt increase.


Dangerous game we are playing here. Let's see how this resolves.

[RetroGamer]

A thought I am having:

If I don't get my devices in the beginning of february, but get them two weeks later, I will get not only 10% more hashrate, but effectively 50% more, since their units are only dividable into 200 Ghash or 250 Ghash moduls.
There are no 50 Ghash or 40 Ghash modules. (Other people who ordered a complete unit, will even get an additional unit! Since that is what 10% implies.)  

So in a strange way It would be good for me if they were two weeks too late.

On the other hand, this is completely stupid and naive of me to think like that...

If they have problems fullfilling my initial order, what makes me think they will have even 50% more than that ready only two weeks later?


It's like you owe someone money, and have problems paying back. If you now want to win time by promising to pay back even MORE money... this does obviously increase the problems to pay back what I owe.

It simply makes my problem worse, and doesn't really help anyone, because my chances to go bankrupt increase.


Dangerous game we are playing here. Let's see how this resolves.

this statement is completely false! and not good!
current difficulty is 1180923195 and this is probably the next jump about 20 - 25% higher and that every 12 days.
in my case would be extraditable 21/12/2013 been with difficulty 1,180,923,195
on 01.01.2014, the difficulty will be at 1,475,859,058 and they have not started with the installation.
the next difficulty 1,844,086,999 will be reached at approximately 1/12/2014.
the 50% increase and then what useful to me 10% penalty even if they provide full modules I had to stop my loss 6 TH / s extra now, unfortunately, it will be when they deliver only 2.8 TH / s

[georgem]

this statement is completely false! and not good!
current difficulty is 1180923195 and this is probably the next jump about 20 - 25% higher and that every 12 days.
in my case would be extraditable 21/12/2013 been with difficulty 1,180,923,195
on 01.01.2014, the difficulty will be at 1,475,859,058 and they have not started with the installation.
the next difficulty 1,844,086,999 will be reached at approximately 1/12/2014.
the 50% increase and then what useful to me 10% penalty even if they provide full modules I had to stop my loss 6 TH / s extra now, unfortunately, it will be when they deliver only 2.8 TH / s

I don't know what difficulty jump we will have the next 10, 20, 30, 40 days. Nobody knows, so be careful with your estimations.

In November we had two difficulty jumps of only 16.07% and 19.29%...

Also, since I plan to primarily mine altcoins... I see no problems.

Ofcourse I meant only a two weeks delay. My calculation makes no sense with larger delays.

[tranquille]

only 16.07% and 19.29%...

.. nuff said

[RHA]

If they have problems fullfilling my initial order, what makes me think they will have even 50% more than that ready only two weeks later?

Don't weep. The delay is not because of slow building the devices one after one. Bitmine is waiting for the whole bunch of the chips.
When the chips come (shall come this week), it will be possible to build all the miners plus what is needed for customer protection plan.