First samples of the CoinCraft A1 demonstrated working
The wait is finally over: yesterday we picked up the first few samples of our CoinCraft A1 ASIC chip from the IC packaging house and overnight we’ve mounted them on a simple test board that we used for initial performances evaluation.
The results are very good: at a very first stage of testing, without any kind of optimizations on the driver and the power supply, we got it hashing stable at the nominal hashing rate at 25.4 – 25.5 GH/s. The chip was running so cool that just a small heat sink above it (see pictures below) without any forced air cooling was enough to let it run!
The evaluation board was drawing 1.655A at 12V while hashing at a constant rate of 25.4 GH/s. If we consider about 15% of losses due to the DC/DC switching block, we get a net power consumption of just 0.67 W/GH/s and this without optimizations of any kind, which are due for the next days of development.
This is the lowest demonstrated nominal power consumption for an ASIC chip in the WORLD!!!
The next step is the assembly of the first prototype hashing units, which will be done in the next few days in our production factory in Europe, for the final tuning of the boards. We don’t expect delays here so we should go very soon in production. Expect also to see a video showing a fully working demo unit with real chips on it.
Another major announcement is that we’re now officially opening the long awaited PCB design contest. Because of the extremely limited supply of this first test batch of chips, we will be giving for free 2 CoinCraft A1 chip to 10 selected developers that have already expressed their interest on the forum in the past months. All other users are of course welcome to apply for the contest too, but in that case the sample chips are going to be sent only after mid January. We expect great things to come up from it, there are USB, modular/universal and even oil-cooled miners coming out from it so… stay tuned!
Last but not least, we want to thank all of our customers for the patience and trust they have given us. We really understand that many may have been anxious these days (we have been too!), and the lack of news didn’t help, but believe me that we’ve all been working during holidays, overnight and weekends to have this product done in the shortest possible time. Everybody will be getting our promised free upgrades thanks to our customer protection plan, a unique and hopefully remarkable premium that no other mining equipment manufacturer has ever given.
Happy New Year to everybody!
