prototype cost about 1000 (eur) and First will be out 16 FPGA model
Does not imply the 16 FPGA model will be 1000 (eur). Seems highly unlikely. Ten times faster than GPU too?
Of course you can build a 16 FPGA rig for less than 1000 eur that will perform 10 times faster than
a GPU rig, but that's just semantics, it could be an ancient GPU just getting a few dozen khash/sec. So we want 10 times better performance than a current high-end GPU for 1000 eur (and with 16 FPGAs?).
Perhaps it is possible though. Pair each (low spec) FPGA with a SDRAM module, might just be doable at that cost? Would love to see some detailed spec on this. But having thought it through, I'm sceptical about the performance. A few 100 kHash/sec tops. Definitely not 10 times GPU performance (for any credible definition of GPU).
This means that any core inside the FPGA is able to do 100Moperation/sec, assuming that we can not arrive to this goal due to sync problem between cores we will have 50Moperation/sec.
It is resonable that we will have a result of 1000 operation for each hash (you know that the litecoin algorithm needs to be repeated more times).
Well if this is true we will have:
- 50Moperation/1000=50.000 hash/sec, now we should multiply it by 10 (10 cores inside the fpga) and we should have 50.000hash*10=100.000hash/sec, assuming that our assumption are still too optimistic we should have half, than 50.000hash/sec
When we put 16 fpgas the result should be 50KHash/sec will begin 50*16=800Khash/sec.
This is a really very worst estimation, the result is about 1Mhash/sec
Coming to cost:
- a low cost FPGA is around 50$ in sample, we will have 50*16=800usd, than we have to add the controller, PCB and chassis, this will have a cost of 500usd that added to the previous one will be 1.300usd.
Now, in production the cyclone fpga will have a cost of 20usd (than 20*16=320usd), pcb 100usd, chassis and controller 300usd. Totale 700usd
Company like altera have another option, you can go in altera and ask for fpga already programmed, normally we can save 50% cost, for the other part we need to define the complete project to define the minimum cost
