Acorn M.2 FPGA based GPU Accelerator

[vapourminer]

a $150 USD per 215+ coupon for the sqrl store. you can use 2 coupons per item, ie $300 toward any one item.

there are a couple more standalone miners for it planned. gpuassist is still planned afaik.

[fr4nkthetank]

Anyone got their money back with this scam?

I had one FPGA and i think 2 acorns ordered when they came out, just to test it out and write reviews on them.  Cancelled pretty soon after that when they moved to discord, etc.  Took a while to get refunded but after constant messages and requests, including posting updates on bitcointalk and elsewhere, they figured it would better to reimburse me rather than have negative publicity I guess.  A couple others like me got reimbursed.  Paid back with bitcoin, prices were about the same so no significant loss for me.  But what a shitshow.  good luck

[miner29]

I am very frustrated with my pair of CLE-215+.

I am trying to run them under Ethos and Windows with several hardware configurations, but the system is unable to detect the Acorns. I have tested so far:

- Asrock H110 Pro BTC+ MoBo with Ethos. Drivers from SQRL and AcornMiner. Result: "I/ACORNMINER   : Failed to get a valid list of Acorn device paths. Is the Acorn Driver installed?"
- Asus Prime Z270-P MoBo with Ethos. Same result as before.
- Laptop with NVMe to USB adapter with Windows 10 and SQRL drivers. The Acorn powers on but it is not recognized.

Am I missing something? Any help would really be appreciated.

Hank,

Ive got 8 acorn been mining since Dec 2018 on Ethos. 
Im using Asrock Z170 Extreme mother boards running 3-4 each.  Then one in a DP3M board with single M.2
The H110 Pro BTC board i was not able to get working due to the PCIe lanes or lack there of. 
And i dont believe the NVMe to usb will ever work for this.

I think the problem is the mobos you have tried.  Happy to help you get it running.

[Larsinist]

Will it come bitstream for these acorn, or are they just bs??

[cheaptacotuesday]

Sorry to budge in. But does anyone have a Acorn 215 with their PCIe adapter for sale? Doesn't seem to be able to be shipped on their site. I kind just want it for the novelty.

[philipma1957]

Anyone got their money back with this scam?

I had one FPGA and i think 2 acorns ordered when they came out, just to test it out and write reviews on them.  Cancelled pretty soon after that when they moved to discord, etc.  Took a while to get refunded but after constant messages and requests, including posting updates on bitcointalk and elsewhere, they figured it would better to reimburse me rather than have negative publicity I guess.  A couple others like me got reimbursed.  Paid back with bitcoin, prices were about the same so no significant loss for me.  But what a shitshow.  good luck

This is what happened for me.  I pretty much followed frank's logic and also was refunded.

[d57heinz]

need a bit more info as to what m2 slots are used etc. some mobos disable m2 if other ports are in use. also are or have they  been flashed?

anyway best bet for support is the sqrl acorn discord. invite below may expire in a day not sure.

go to

https://discord.gg/U5KKaG

that should link you to the fpga discord then go to #sqrl-acorn.

EDIT: try here too
https://fpga.guide/en/howto-mine-acorn/

Thought I’d share this here since you post it often. Br. Check your computer

https://qr.ae/TWHxAd

[philipma1957]

need a bit more info as to what m2 slots are used etc. some mobos disable m2 if other ports are in use. also are or have they  been flashed?

anyway best bet for support is the sqrl acorn discord. invite below may expire in a day not sure.

go to

https://discord.gg/U5KKaG

that should link you to the fpga discord then go to #sqrl-acorn.

EDIT: try here too
https://fpga.guide/en/howto-mine-acorn/

Thought I’d share this here since you post it often. Br. Check your computer

https://qr.ae/TWHxAd

nice info I wonder if Mac is safe from it

[vapourminer]

Thought I’d share this here since you post it often. Br. Check your computer

https://qr.ae/TWHxAd

interesting. thanks for the link.

hunted around the windows computer i use for discord and found nothing related to "discord" in my programs list or any of my %appdata% folders. i only run discord through my browser though, i never installed any specific discord app on the computers. perhaps thats why? i need to look into this further as the web version of discord says it updates itself on occasion so something related to discord is persistent on the computer.

i do use discord a lot on my phone though. just like phil mentioned about mac versions, i now wonder about android..

[bensam1231]

No, Sqrl essentially never supported Acorns and didn't release any new bitstreams for them (there is a ancient slightly improved Tribus miner). GPU assist was never working, nor was any real effort put into commissioning a third party. A community member attempted to get a contractor to do it and ended up getting screwed as he didn't specify particulars (I told him to make sure he did this, however I don't have the technical background to make suggestions on it). Other 'helpful' community members who have technical background to make suggestions never offered before hand, but said similar after the fact. That's about the extent of the community on the discord.

Refunds are backlogged roughly 3-4 months. I bought Forestkittens and was offered a refund after it became apparent it was smoke and mirrors (lots of pretending things aren't what they are, including not offering concrete numbers on anything). I opted to not receive it as it currently seems as though the company doesn't prioritize things that make money (miners) or if they do they aren't public and mining is a side gig, which you'll receive the same level of commitment. I'm more interested in owning something then owning IOUs if the company goes the way it's starting to look like.

Currently Acorns are essentially just a toy they threw at a lot of people then never followed up with (some people have a lot of money invested in those, I have two), but have every excuse as to why that didn't happen. Truth of that is they never really went out of their way to commission a third party and their solo bitstreams aren't remotely worth it. Hard to believe a random community member has better connections then a FPGA company? Forestkittens ($2000) are starting to look as though they're in the same boat. With a $.50/d revenue bitstream for x16rv2 that has been out for a month and no communication from the development team. They've been released for about two months now, so take that for what it is.

I've been privy to private information that there was a another algo available prior to launch for FKs, however in a smaller coin emission market that they don't share with the public. I'm sure currently running it internally. Once again take that for what it's worth.


Also don't click links from unknown sources. FPGA guide is legit, not sure what that other website is. There is a FPGA discord, of which the majority of this information is available on. https://discord.gg/25DpDCS

If you are a bitstream developer, you should drop by, they definitely could use the help.

[Hueristic]

So basically these things are still just doorstops?

[bensam1231]

Yes or in their words 'for developers'. They also have a weird ethos of 'not making money printing machines', which to be honest is quite convoluted. That's why we're all here. You can't fund a million dollar company mass producing fpgas with no real application for those fpgas besides developers (which is essentially hobbyists). I'm sure there is a private developer somewhere making bank off private bitstreams, but for common folk that's not us. We just eat the development cost through empty promises for someone else to profit off of.

I stand corrected, FKs are now $1500, so early adopters myself got screwed out of $500 per unit by buying two months ago. That's a significant amount of money.

[Hueristic]

Yes or in their words 'for developers'. They also have a weird ethos of 'not making money printing machines', which to be honest is quite convoluted. That's why we're all here. You can't fund a million dollar company mass producing fpgas with no real application for those fpgas besides developers (which is essentially hobbyists). I'm sure there is a private developer somewhere making bank off private bitstreams, but for common folk that's not us. We just eat the development cost through empty promises for someone else to profit off of.

I stand corrected, FKs are now $1500, so early adopters myself got screwed out of $500 per unit by buying two months ago. That's a significant amount of money.

Thanks for the reply, sorry the best i can do is give you a +sM.

[DreamBlob]

Yes or in their words 'for developers'. They also have a weird ethos of 'not making money printing machines', which to be honest is quite convoluted. That's why we're all here. You can't fund a million dollar company mass producing fpgas with no real application for those fpgas besides developers (which is essentially hobbyists). I'm sure there is a private developer somewhere making bank off private bitstreams, but for common folk that's not us. We just eat the development cost through empty promises for someone else to profit off of.

I stand corrected, FKs are now $1500, so early adopters myself got screwed out of $500 per unit by buying two months ago. That's a significant amount of money.

I think they credited users the difference if you purchased FKs at 2k, or atleast that was my understanding. I didnt purchase any so you would have to ask someone over on discord or email their support for clarification.

[bensam1231]

Yes or in their words 'for developers'. They also have a weird ethos of 'not making money printing machines', which to be honest is quite convoluted. That's why we're all here. You can't fund a million dollar company mass producing fpgas with no real application for those fpgas besides developers (which is essentially hobbyists). I'm sure there is a private developer somewhere making bank off private bitstreams, but for common folk that's not us. We just eat the development cost through empty promises for someone else to profit off of.

I stand corrected, FKs are now $1500, so early adopters myself got screwed out of $500 per unit by buying two months ago. That's a significant amount of money.

I think they credited users the difference if you purchased FKs at 2k, or atleast that was my understanding. I didnt purchase any so you would have to ask someone over on discord or email their support for clarification.

According to support it's a temporary sale price and they aren't offering anything (at least to me). I have a larger order as well, so that might effect things. That would be rather unnerving if some people are getting 25% refunds and others aren't.

Whether or not this is actually happening, I'm not on the receiving end of it and basically was told to fuck off(?). As a FK early adopter more boot to your ass for supporting at launch.

[cryptolumos]

Yes or in their words 'for developers'. They also have a weird ethos of 'not making money printing machines', which to be honest is quite convoluted. That's why we're all here. You can't fund a million dollar company mass producing fpgas with no real application for those fpgas besides developers (which is essentially hobbyists). I'm sure there is a private developer somewhere making bank off private bitstreams, but for common folk that's not us. We just eat the development cost through empty promises for someone else to profit off of.

I stand corrected, FKs are now $1500, so early adopters myself got screwed out of $500 per unit by buying two months ago. That's a significant amount of money.

I think they credited users the difference if you purchased FKs at 2k, or atleast that was my understanding. I didnt purchase any so you would have to ask someone over on discord or email their support for clarification.

According to support it's a temporary sale price and they aren't offering anything (at least to me). I have a larger order as well, so that might effect things. That would be rather unnerving if some people are getting 25% refunds and others aren't.

Whether or not this is actually happening, I'm not on the receiving end of it and basically was told to fuck off(?). As a FK early adopter more boot to your ass for supporting at launch.

They arent crediting anyone, its a coupon code for a sale. and "and no communication from the development team" they post everyday in the FPGA discord. Glad u got booted out of there Masneb u spread cancerous fud like no other. Do us all a favor and find a different hobby.

[bensam1231]

This isn't a hobby, it's a job, much like many people here. They don't post daily. The support does. They didn't offer any meaningful updates on their products for roughly a month and started again yesterday. If you mean this is FUD as the Acorns have working GPU assist or even have a meaningful solo miner, feel free to prove me wrong (I and a bunch of people would be interested in that) or FKs are earning more then $.5/d, I would also be interested in that as would a lot of other people. No? Okay.

It's weird how you can simply disprove what someone says by putting into context the already available facts.

As far as the 25% discount goes. I was a early adopter, I purchased a month and a half ago. During that time all that's been made available was a $.5/d miner, despite other algos talked about prior to launch and things just on the horizon (and I know another was available prior to launch, which wasn't released). The price was then reduced by 25%, for a 'sale' or otherwise (which is still going on). They gave out coupons for the Acorns to make users feel as though they weren't 'ripped off', yet that no longer applies to FKs and I can't be bitter about donating $500 per unit to their company for the honor of owning a paperweight.

In case you guys haven't figured it out yet, their company has a small very strong following and any sort of negativity towards their company is met by zealots (regardless of the fact they neither make purchases in any amount or the company delivers). Luckily BCT isn't related to the discord and what happens here is beyond the reach of their coercion and dramatic ultimatums.

Anything here can be verified by joining the discord link which I already freely gave.

[cryptolumos]

This isn't a hobby, it's a job, much like many people here. They don't post daily. The support does. They didn't offer any meaningful updates on their products for roughly a month and started again yesterday. If you mean this is FUD as the Acorns have working GPU assist or even have a meaningful solo miner, feel free to prove me wrong (I and a bunch of people would be interested in that) or FKs are earning more then $.5/d, I would also be interested in that as would a lot of other people. No? Okay.

It's weird how you can simply disprove what someone says by putting into context the already available facts.

As far as the 25% discount goes. I was a early adopter, I purchased a month and a half ago. During that time all that's been made available was a $.5/d miner, despite other algos talked about prior to launch and things just on the horizon (and I know another was available prior to launch, which wasn't released). The price was then reduced by 25%, for a 'sale' or otherwise (which is still going on). They gave out coupons for the Acorns to make users feel as though they weren't 'ripped off', yet that no longer applies to FKs and I can't be bitter about donating $500 per unit to their company and getting nothing in return for it.

In case you guys haven't figured it out yet, their company has a small very strong following and any sort of negativity towards their company is met by zealots (regardless of the fact they neither make purchases in any amount or the company delivers). Luckily BCT isn't related to the discord and what happens here is beyond the reach of their coercion and dramatic ultimatums.

Anything here can be verified by joining the discord link which I already freely gave.

It sure can and we will point them to the correct information, not the BS you spread continuously. "yet that no longer applies to FKs and I can't be bitter about donating $500 per unit to their company for the honor of owning a paperweight." acorn coupons can still be used, again with making shit up as usual

[Hueristic]

Well lets see, the Title of this thread is...


Acorn M.2 FPGA based GPU Accelerator

and the Question really is, Are they Accelerating GPU's???


Apparently the answer is NO.


Therefore they are scammers.


This looks pretty damn cut and dry to me.


If I had bought one I would have opened a scammers tag, and if anyone does then post the link here and i will support it.


https://web.archive.org/web/20191109042719/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4391318.0

This information all existed in the discord but I wanted to share it with everyone.

So we’ve developed an FPGA accelerator over the past few months in M.2 (same as nVME drives) form factor designed to operate both standalone and in conjunction with GPUs.

The first version to be released has 4x high speed PCIe lanes to communicate between the system/GPUs as well as 512MB or 1GB of onboard DDR3 along with a 100k+ LE or 200k+ LE FPGA of high speed grade. We’ve named it the Acorn, and the three models are the CLE-101, CLE-215, and CLE-215+

General expectation is it will provide performance roughly scaled with price/performance of the VCU1525, but it has a unique role and is not applicable to all of the same algorithms. Its performance in this role is dominated by its interconnect bandwidth and not its processing power.

It is capable of providing up to 30MH of lift to a mining system with GPUs on a hand full of algorithms or operate independently at higher-than-GPU level hashrates for other non-memory intensive algorithms (Keccak, etc). I will be releasing it alongside our mining software and bitstreams to support hybrid GPU acceleration. This project was not developed commercially, it was developed out of a product for my day job for internal use in our own mining systems to give an edge to traditional PCs and gaming systems turned miners.

The accelerator works by streaming high bandwidth hash state between GPUs and the FPGA over PCIe., allowing each piece of hardware to handle the portion of the algorithm it is best at. In general this means memory bandwidth or area heavy portions of the algorithm may be handled by the GPU, and hash algorithms designed for hardware implementations are handled by the FPGA. This approach works for any algorithm whose internal state is 256 bit (60Mh gains) or 512 bit (x16r, Lyra2Rev2, etc.) or smaller. The accelerator supports rapidly reconfiguring its algorithms from on-board DDR to enable handling of per-block or period (TimeTravel10) re-sequencing. It was designed originally to provide performance gains (especially for older GPUs with poor cores) and power savings for ETH by way of offloading the opening and closing Keccak calculations, as well as hash-selection to improve locality of reference for early ETH rounds.

Given the anticipated path of ETH itself regarding POS and other fork possibilities please consider all those things if ETH is your target. It may be the most popular coin for GPUs, that does not mean it is the best use of FPGA or hybrid tech.

I’ve decided to make this hardware available to community at near cost, given all the FPGA interest lately, alongside my belief that broadly available general purpose acceleration hardware at its true market cost (not low volume industry specific dev boards) is the best defense against complete ASIC centralization. You will see this philosophy reflected in my activity around the VCU1525 board as well.

Anticipated pre-order prices of $199 for the CLE-101 512MB variant and $329 on the high end highest speed grade CLE-215+ 1GB DRAM version. On-board power consumption is nominally 15W. It will include a heatsink adequate for this dissipation level with reasonable airflow. It is important to note that to fit the FPGA this adapter is slightly outside of the 2280 M.2 specification, weighing in at 2380. The vast majority of M.2 slots should not have an issue with this.

I am also pursuing making available well priced options for individual PCIe x4 to M.2 M-key host boards (these are broadly available for $10-15), as well as Quad-M.2 PCIe switched and Bifurcated x16 host boards for those who do not have the available M.2 M-Key slots or require up to 240MH of acceleration.

I won’t post exact per algorithm stats or performance until I can do final testing of the actual boards to be shipped with the release hardware/heatsink/thermal management pieces in place, at which point I’ll accept pre-orders. This device requires quite a bit of testing to cover the list of common GPUs, PCIe configurations, and supported algorithms. I have no desire to sell anyone anything not useful to them, or to push a board at all, let alone one based on 3D renders, prototype parts pictures, or choppy YouTube videos, so I believe this full set of data along with final product pictures and overview must be published before I will take any preorders. I am sorry if that tests your patience.

Prototypes exist and I’ve already secured most of the hardware for a first batch so lead time will only be PCB + assembly.

At the time of shipping I will be releasing our internal miner software in closed source form for Windows and Linux that supports GPU only as well as Hybrid acceleration. You’re also welcome to develop your own bitstreams for the accelerator, and will have all the specifications necessary to do so.

I will also be publishing the interface for the bitstreams so that open source miners that wish to can use the FPGA directly.

We are handling all CE, FCC, RoHS, and other certifications as well as ITAR and export compliance, so we will be able to ship to all non-US embargo’d countries. Taxes and import duties will fall on the purchaser. We will be offering at least a 90 day warranty.

All feedback is welcome. This is not my source of income, nor that of the rest of my team, and we don’t want anyone’s money unless they are happy with what we’re offering. I’m also happy to continue conversations I am already having with coin devs and miner developers on how or if FPGAs fit into their plans for their coin and/or ASIC Resistance strategies. This community is about choice, and I will respect the choices of those teams.

So all I would like from all of you beyond the feedback, is for anyone interested to hit our pre-order registration survey at http://www.squirrelsresearch.com to help us ensure we’re covering your needs and wants and have all the appropriate hardware secured. Based on that info very detailed performance information and full device photos (spoiler - it looks like an SSD with a heatsink on it!) will be published at the time preorders open, expected in mid-June.

- David

[mk111]

What a joke!!! Almost one and a half year later and still no working product.