Custom FPGA Board for Sale!

[Pipesnake]

If shares for said theroetical FPGA comany could be purchased on GLBSE i would certainly buy some myself.

+1

[dovewing2000]

If shares for said theroetical FPGA comany could be purchased on GLBSE i would certainly buy some myself.

+1 as well... just trying to get these R&D and mining hotter with less heat... (pun intended)

[newMeat1]

dovewing, Pipesnake, and deslok... I appreciate the votes of confidence. We definitely thought about going with GLBSE about a month ago. In fact, we even had some meetings with IBB about investing in the project.

Trouble is, we already have 5 talented people working on these boards, so we split our meager profits 5 ways. With 5 different people, managing the project is already tough. I think dealing with investors would make it even worse.

We're already pushing to the next level as rapidly as we can, being held back only by shipping delays and board manufacture delays.

[dovewing2000]

dovewing, Pipesnake, and deslok... I appreciate the votes of confidence. We definitely thought about going with GLBSE about a month ago. In fact, we even had some meetings with IBB about investing in the project.

Trouble is, we already have 5 talented people working on these boards, so we split our meager profits 5 ways. With 5 different people, managing the project is already tough. I think dealing with investors would make it even worse.

We're already pushing to the next level as rapidly as we can, being held back only by shipping delays and board manufacture delays.

understood - from investor's point of view.. i think it's more to do with profit (ie i want the money) and less to do with how u guys design it... the product/how it's developed/researched is not really something investors would think too much about, unless they want to be doing R&D...
the reason i bring up GLBSE is because that would immediately give some buffer for R&D/Manufacturing and give you guys some money back from investing in dev kits or material used, etcetc...

but either way I do hope you guys can make headways as you can tell a lot of interest is garnered from this thread if not due to the "price of entry" for the current incarnation of the product...

on a side note though... if the product can be daisy chained with usb cable.. you can probably use regular heat sink to cool it due to the larger surface area..

               usb cable
[ board 1 ]========[board 2]
     ||                         ||
[board 3 ]========[board 4]

just suggestions/ideas...

[newMeat1]

My personal favorite solution for passive cooling is mineral oil. Here's a link to a fish tank-mineral oil PC. If I had one of these boards a.t.m., it's what I would do. But, mineral oil is expensive and some people probably don't want oily, drippy boards.

I guess I can say this- if you want a custom cooling solution for your board, and it's easy to accomodate, just tell us! Like, maybe you don't want a fan on yours because you will be buying a different heatsink. We can accomodate that

[newMeat1]

when boards are sold... the profit is divided upon the shares hold... and distributed among share holders..? if shareholders wants to buy at discount they get a % related to the % of shares they hold...?

I've been thinking more about your suggestion. I think we could make it work, but not exactly as you imagined.

A big problem for us:
On one hand, we don't know how many boards we can sell. On the other hand, bulk discounts could drastically reduce the price of these boards. To give you an idea of how much... if we only make 5, each PCB costs about $60. If we make 70, each PCB costs less than $10 (I think $5 is the exact #, if i remember right).

So maybe we could take pre-orders. It would be to the benefit of everyone. We know exactly how many to make, you get a bulk discount. The only problem I see is, we don't know exactly how much the boards will cost yet. Any suggestions? I'm thinking, right now, that perhaps we could require a $50 payment to secure your order slot. The remainder, whatever it turns out to be, would be paid prior to board manufacture.

I will have to talk this over with the rest of the dev team. By the way, fizzisist has started helping us out. He has a lot of knowledge relating to communication interfaces, circuit design, and probably more skills that I don't know about yet. So, if you see him on this thread, know that he's a core member of the  team.

[dovewing2000]

when boards are sold... the profit is divided upon the shares hold... and distributed among share holders..? if shareholders wants to buy at discount they get a % related to the % of shares they hold...?

I've been thinking more about your suggestion. I think we could make it work, but not exactly as you imagined.

A big problem for us:
On one hand, we don't know how many boards we can sell. On the other hand, bulk discounts could drastically reduce the price of these boards. To give you an idea of how much... if we only make 5, each PCB costs about $60. If we make 70, each PCB costs less than $10 (I think $5 is the exact #, if i remember right).

So maybe we could take pre-orders. It would be to the benefit of everyone. We know exactly how many to make, you get a bulk discount. The only problem I see is, we don't know exactly how much the boards will cost yet. Any suggestions? I'm thinking, right now, that perhaps we could require a $50 payment to secure your order slot. The remainder, whatever it turns out to be, would be paid prior to board manufacture.

I will have to talk this over with the rest of the dev team. By the way, fizzisist has started helping us out. He has a lot of knowledge relating to communication interfaces, circuit design, and probably more skills that I don't know about yet. So, if you see him on this thread, know that he's a core member of the  team.

Cool - i think the pre-order deposit idea would work (ie 10% of the price for more than 5 units and a set amount for small quantity)

I assume pcb is the entire board? (can we see a few pics of the board?)

[newMeat1]

The PCB is just the green silicon thing, like in this picture:



The newest batch of boards will likely look very similar to our old ones-- see the first post in this thread for pics.

[dovewing2000]

let's say next batch... if people are willing to order in bulk... what will be the pricing be like? (if i get way ahead of the schedule let me know... just asking questions as they pop up in my head)

[li_gangyi]

let's say next batch... if people are willing to order in bulk... what will be the pricing be like? (if i get way ahead of the schedule let me know... just asking questions as they pop up in my head)

How big is "bulk"? 10? 100? It makes a huge difference.

[newMeat1]

I'll just give you a rough idea. We'll flesh this out better later on.

Total community order size    -      Cost per board
5 boards - $400
10 boards - $395
25 - $390
.
.
.
70 boards - $335

Li, please correct me if I'm way off

[molecular]

I wrote down some very rough profitability calculations for this product:

https://bitcoin.org.uk/forums/topic/88-mining-for-profit-or-for-fun/page__view__findpost__p__418

It should be clear to anyone that at this point in time, such an investment can only be considered to be "for fun" or "a step in the door". Not trying to drive people away, though, this is the future of mining (alongside ASIC mining), just not the immediate future.

[dovewing2000]

I wrote down some very rough profitability calculations for this product:

https://bitcoin.org.uk/forums/topic/88-mining-for-profit-or-for-fun/page__view__findpost__p__418

It should be clear to anyone that at this point in time, such an investment can only be considered to be "for fun" or "a step in the door". Not trying to drive people away, though, this is the future of mining (alongside ASIC mining), just not the immediate future.

that's why i suggested the company idea... to create a R&D pool and to aim for a good Mh/s per $ ratio... instead of pushing out 100Mh/s boards...
may be aim for improving to 300-400 (without optimization) per board with this current price? let me know how feasible it is guys?

[ElectricMucus]

The problem is fpgas do not scale as well if you use multiple chips (depends actually, could be linear) there are real monsters though, virtex-7 and so on which could deliver that performance but cost about this price just for a chip (or more)

The next thing is the FPGAs wouldn't get any cheaper (that means a fraction of the price) unless in _huge_ numbers. And even then the costs wouldn't go down as drastically since afik if you buy a whole lot you get them untested...

[li_gangyi]

The problem is fpgas do not scale as well if you use multiple chips (depends actually, could be linear) there are real monsters though, virtex-7 and so on which could deliver that performance but cost about this price just for a chip (or more)

The next thing is the FPGAs wouldn't get any cheaper (that means a fraction of the price) unless in _huge_ numbers. And even then the costs wouldn't go down as drastically since afik if you buy a whole lot you get them untested...

It does scale linearly with each FPGA addition, until of course you run out of network bandwidth or CPU power to feed the FPGAs quick enough.

To answer the previous question on whether the ITX motherboards are fast/good enough. On the current mining script (which isn't very well optimsed) my Q6600 quad core processor reports a utilisation of 3-4% max in windows when it's running. No idea how much that scales to when it's running on an atom, but it should be more then good enough. I need to test this out though, do have an atom board lying around.

[Miner99er]

Why couldn't we put 2 or more FPGA chips on one PCB tho, ala (and forgive the reference) Voodoo 5 5500 or 6000?

So ordering 1 FPGA board is $440, and ordering 4 would be $1760

but if we can get 4 on 1 PCB, and 20 boards together, the each chip is $360, and a board sells for $1440.

(Which is using the cost of 1 FPGA miner sold in the thread, and newMeat1's prices for bulk orders above.)

You're reducing your ROI from 22.5 months to 19.2... still well after the block reward halves, but in the right direction.

Now, I don't know how hard this would be to program for... or even if it's possible... but it seems that getting more chips on the PCB would be beneficial to all.

[li_gangyi]

Why couldn't we put 2 or more FPGA chips on one PCB tho, ala (and forgive the reference) Voodoo 5 5500 or 6000?

So ordering 1 FPGA board is $440, and ordering 4 would be $1760

but if we can get 4 on 1 PCB, and 20 boards together, the each chip is $360, and a board sells for $1440.

(Which is using the cost of 1 FPGA miner sold in the thread, and newMeat1's prices for bulk orders above.)

You're reducing your ROI from 22.5 months to 19.2... still well after the block reward halves, but in the right direction.

Now, I don't know how hard this would be to program for... or even if it's possible... but it seems that getting more chips on the PCB would be beneficial to all.

It doesn't quite scale like that, since you're now using a larger PCB (slightly increased cost per board), but yes we are looking into that to make sre that's feasible, the original plan was to keep everything simple and easy to debug, thus only 1 FPGA per board, once you start going upwards there's gonna be alot more involved like software/communication issues that need to be worked out, no one I know has a dual FPGA board to test this out. Not to worry though, development is still on-going in the background and we'll bring them out when they're ready.

[newMeat1]

may be aim for improving to 300-400 (without optimization) per board with this current price? let me know how feasible it is guys?

300-400 Mhash/s for $440 is out of the question, I think. Each FPGA alone costs $200, and we push them as hard as they will go. You might see 150 Mhash/s out of each FPGA chip, dependent on programming improvements. If we put 2 on a board (which fizzisist is working on right now), maybe you would see 300 MHash/s for $500. I think that's the absolute best we can expect from a Spartan 6.

Somebody mentioned the Virtex-7 series of chips. Those are the replacement for the Spartan 6's. When those become available... maybe your figures would be possible. It's far too early to say.

[kirax]

may be aim for improving to 300-400 (without optimization) per board with this current price? let me know how feasible it is guys?

300-400 Mhash/s for $440 is out of the question, I think. Each FPGA alone costs $200, and we push them as hard as they will go. You might see 150 Mhash/s out of each FPGA chip, dependent on programming improvements. If we put 2 on a board (which fizzisist is working on right now), maybe you would see 300 MHash/s for $500. I think that's the absolute best we can expect from a Spartan 6.

Somebody mentioned the Virtex series of chips. Those are the replacement for the Spartan 6's. When those become available... maybe your figures would be possible. It's far too early to say.

I just wanted to add a note of support for this project, I am looking forward to your next implementation: I considered the previous model already, but I don't quite have the capitol for a $500 investment with a two year payoff at my power rates... although, it is tempting, and the next incarnation could break my resolve :p

[newMeat1]

The architecture of the next batch is settled. We are still working out some details, but we should have a working board in 3 weeks.

There will be space for 2 FPGA's on the next board. If you only want 1, then we will leave one spot on the board blank.

We will be doing pre-ordering through Cablesaurus (our exclusive distributor in the future). It's $50 to preorder your board (same cost whether you want one or 2 FPGAs). Just before manufacturing the boards, we will ask you to pay the remaining balance. With this preorder system, we will make the right # of boards as well as getting a volume discount. Somebody will post here again when the preorder system is up and running on cablesaurus.com (it's not up quite yet). Cablesaurus takes Paypal and bitcoins.

The more preorders we get, the cheaper the boards will be for everybody!

Here are our basic guarantees about the boards:
1. Delivery by Nov. 1st 2011 (hopefully sooner, I left some extra time in case we screw up)
2. Only a USB cord and 4-pin Molex will be required to run it (no Platform cable)

Specific to 1-FPGA boards:
- at least 90 Mhash/s avg hash rate
- less than 7.5W power draw
- costs less than $420 (likely quite a bit less, especially if we get decent volume discounts)

Specific to 2-FPGA boards:
-at least 180 Mhash/s avg hash rate
-less than 15W power draw
-costs less than $620

For the record- these are our first 4 customers who get 10% discounts on future purchases:
molecular, fpgaminer, thirdlight, and Pipesnake.