Check this out, looking around to help.
http://imgur.com/a/CMazz#0Every BFL PCB with chip layout.
P.S. I'm looking at water cooling options could you find me dimensions on the chip area (would a 50x50mm block work?) and the hole centers for the heat sink mount.
Oh those... pictures... are interesting. They look like BFL pictures, what were they thinking?
Let's see:
The jally board has one chip. Way more importantly, it has *no* MOSFETs on the 1 volt supply line. Those guys were going to power it off the USB line like some big Erupter. Well, we know that didn't work. But very interesting, no capacitors, no inductors, no nothing. That board would not have been able to do anything interesting.
The little single board is also interesting. 4 chips. 30 GH was the rated speed, I think they were either smoking something or the chips did not do quite as much as they thought they would. One would need 7+gh in order to pull 30gh with 4 chips, and it took eight to make 30, and even that is stressing the board's power supplies.
THAT is what happened. They totally mis-read the power consumption on the chips. They thought you could run a chip at super low power and 4.5gh for the jally, but it turned out they needed full power plus. So they had to use fully powered SC boards plus two chips because one wouldn't quite hash it (hah, I kill myself). Which sank the possibility of passive cooling, so into the dustbin went the coffee cup warmer cases.
The single/30 needed 8 chips, and you can't even run 4 chips in the box there and expect it not to overheat. Believe me, I tried, fail. Even with all eight, the power FETs were overheating so they had to add bottom cooling. Can't do that in a little single box, so they had to build the bigger box with space under it and a side fan. Made one box for 30 and 60 (dual 30's) at which point they just said "screw it, we'll use the little single boards and mid-quality chips for the jalapenos, offer a "bump up" to try to recoup costs by putting two grade A chips, and delay the singles and 60's.
And that is exactly what happened. Although running at full 30gh is at the edge of what the single board can handle without blowing FETs so they wrote code to limit the hash speed to 30+.04%. And they slowly shipped 30's and 60's, which explains why people there were grumpy.
But imagine being in the BFL factory: You have to put down twice as many chips, had to scrap a whole pile of jally cases, and worst you had to fill jalapeno orders with much more expensive quality cases, fans, power supplies, and fuck knows what else including boards with full power support for a product that cost several times as much.
And THEN you have to build new cases, double the heatsink counts, chip counts, and run the thing at the edge to meet the 30gh "promise".
Now your jallies hit the streets, and people start modding them. Word gets out, BFL leaves a lot of performance there, boost it up dude! The jally people can get away with it, and then the single/30 and single/60 people start doing it....
If the single/30 had split the chips across both sides of the board the users might have gotten away with hot-dogging it to 35+gh. But BFL was already way under the money rock with this; they needed to keep costs down so they sold the other side of the board with no components. Not needed. And they reduced the new speed sold to 25gh, which is much safer and will probably last forever.
So the Single/30 and Single/60 people load up code revs with no restrictions. Power draw goes way up, FETs explode, and people start bitching on the forums. Because they thought they could make their singles faster, expected it.
Ooops. Poor BFL. They have really tried to do the right thing here, even when many other companies said fuck it and quit. I do have to give them a lot of credit here, and I think the bashing is missing the point. They weren't malicious, indeed their solution was pretty damn impressive.
Maybe this is what happened. But the chips and pics and stories are all coming together with what I am seeing here totally independently. I wouldn't go over 6 chips....
Fascinating.
