Acorn M.2 FPGA based GPU Accelerator

[d57heinz]

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

Well for that matter btc over 10 years and we still don’t have anything much more than what it started with. Just more “influencers” pushing the hype to keep prices high.  It’s really come full circle to what btc was supposed to be about.  It’s funny how this system purported to upend the financial sector is catering and pandering to their every will.  Other than the blockchain i find btc being a store of value naive and just plain foolish!   System full of scammers.  And the ones who aren’t don’t have the means to do what’s right.  Guess that’s why they don’t have the means. Their honest. 

BR

[1714971451]

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[vapourminer]

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

1st let me say im about 6 grand USD in the hole with my bcu, fk and acorns.

that being said, they actually do have "working products" but the software is sorely lacking. the bcu, fk, and acorns i have all run at a very slight profit. maybe in 6 years ill break even. maybe. unless those higher powered bitstreams that get promised finally get here.

but scammers? i wouldnt go that far (but there may be facts im unaware of). i knew the risks and took it. so far its been a loss. oh well. thats on me.

[Hueristic]

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

1st let me say im about 6 grand USD in the hole with my bcu, fk and acorns.

that being said, they actually do have "working products" but the software is sorely lacking. the bcu, fk, and acorns i have all run at a very slight profit. maybe in 6 years ill break even. maybe. unless those higher powered bitstreams that get promised finally get here.

but scammers? i wouldnt go that far (but there may be facts im unaware of). i knew the risks and took it. so far its been a loss. oh well. thats on me.

It doesn't matter if you profited or not. There are tons of scams where people profited. The question is did they provide what they promised? That is pretty cut and dry.

Can anyone link me to a functioning GPU acceleration product?

At what point do you say "they lied"?

[bensam1231]

Yes, the current tactic with newer ASICs is bait and switch with performance numbers and efficiency gains. Then they're marked off as 'still being profitable', when that wasn't the original investment nor is it nearly the same thing. Strong is currently doing this with all it's products. With Acorns they attempted to remedy this with coupons and refunds (to a certain extent), that's why I asked if that same thing applied to FKs and I was met with a strongly worded 'why would you ever ask that?!?!'.

The hardware is there, but the software definitely is not and it seems like they're always dead set on biting off more then they can chew then not only getting blowback from that when it falls through, but all existing customers suffer because of it.

I was very active on the discord and one of the things I mentioned close to a year ago is the software and kept talking about software and bitstreams as it seemed like the weak link. Here we are, still lacking software (bitstreams). And while it's fine and dandy to gloat about 'how good it will be' and 'how everyone will want one', that's not the reality that currently exists. If you're a larger farm with private developers you're making bank off of this. Most of us that helped crowd source this are not.

[Rabinovitch]

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.

Exactly. Scammers as they are.

[vapourminer]

1st let me say im about 6 grand USD in the hole with my bcu, fk and acorns.

that being said, they actually do have "working products" but the software is sorely lacking. the bcu, fk, and acorns i have all run at a very slight profit. maybe in 6 years ill break even. maybe. unless those higher powered bitstreams that get promised finally get here.

but scammers? i wouldnt go that far (but there may be facts im unaware of). i knew the risks and took it. so far its been a loss. oh well. thats on me.

It doesn't matter if you profited or not. There are tons of scams where people profited. The question is did they provide what they promised? That is pretty cut and dry.

Can anyone link me to a functioning GPU acceleration product?

At what point do you say "they lied"?

oh there were lies involved.. but from whom? kristy (ohgodagirl) seems (at least from my pov) to be the one that lied, and others (people and companies) that believed her and made promises based on her lies got burned big. could this have been handled better? sure but with lawyers involved we wont know till its over.

so was the whole acorn thing a scam? on sqrls part, i dont think so, just a lot of naivety. others opinions vary of course. but a scam to me is.. well BFL was a scam from the start, even with shipping products. scam was the very foundation of BFL. i cant bring myself to put sqrl in that category. time may change my mind however.

anyway, sqrl does tend to have ambitious launch schedules. and missed deadlines are a running joke that long ago stopped being funny. sqrl thought there would be a lot more devs cooperating on bitstreams. on that they were wrong, lot of devs doing their own thing, so lots of reinventing the wheel. slows things down considerably.

as for the original purpose of acorns, helping gpus, that window of opportunity is past. and yes, that sucks. it may even of worked if gpu acceleration code had been ready when the acorns were released.. who knows?

but now, acorns are a curiosity. that may find uses down the road, possibly unrelated to mining. hope so, they are too small to make proper door stops.

The hardware is there, but the software definitely is not and it seems like they're always dead set on biting off more then they can chew then not only getting blowback from that when it falls through, but all existing customers suffer because of it.

very true. every missed deadline on their part hurt the bottom line on every customer. i bought early and watched my money more or less evaporate as the missed deadlines accumulated.

I was very active on the discord and one of the things I mentioned close to a year ago is the software and kept talking about software and bitstreams as it seemed like the weak link. Here we are, still lacking software (bitstreams). And while it's fine and dandy to gloat about 'how good it will be' and 'how everyone will want one', that's not the reality that currently exists. If you're a larger farm with private developers you're making bank off of this. Most of us that helped crowd source this are not.

yeah i bough acorns pretty much as soon as they came out. and i sure havent made bank on acorns. basically i watched my money go seemingly everywhere but the actual code needed to make it useful.

there is a dev or two on discord that are playing with acorn/gpu accelerations but its private devs, not associated with sqrl. may be wrong on that though.

[bensam1231]

Yup to most of that. I in no way, shape, or form will accept any of their deflection as to why they 'can't' deliver. I don't see GPUH going out of his way to actively look for developers. He half ass offered (not asked) to pay developers for their code, which was buried in chat. Never was pinned. Never made it to an announcement page. They don't even have any presence on BCT, one of the biggest resources for crypto development. It's not on their website that they're actively recruiting for development opportunities. It's like they're too proud to point out they need help.

At no point did it ever outwardly seem like they were asking for help and I haven't seen them formally even ask for it. Besides 'oh we could use some more developers' and literally everything burning down around them because of lack of software, which you're aware of if you purchased their hardware. Their current strategy for this is seemingly just to 'sell more hardware' to people who don't want it because they don't make it useful.

Currently we're on month two after release of FKs and still don't have meaningful bitstreams for them. I bought in for $30k worth of FKs and it's like they just expected me to disappear. Talk about things that are 'on the way', the same talk we received before FKs were released and the same talk we had with Acorns. This is just gross mismanagement and any time you point this out on discord it's met with either excuses or 'oh god the trolls are out again, why wont the mods do anything!??!'. Don't get me wrong, there is most definitely legitimate excuses, and there are also options to deal with those 'problems', like hiring freelance developers.

The crazy thing is, while you can talk about litigation and how GPUH talks about 'having to be hands off' with development of some things, that is absolute BS. He 100% can help someone without ever making it known that he's doing so. Either through a trusted source or literally just making a new username to contribute work.

That aside, if a person in the community which knows very little about actual bitstream programming can hire a developer and have something worked on, even if it never reached a very lucrative state because he didn't have the expertise to know what to request, they definitely can do the same thing. GPUH supposedly offered to pay for third party development, but Matt, the person who commissioned the work never got reimbursed for any of it. So more words without any bearing. The only way this all can be described is as hubris.


As far as being labeled a scam, which you're trying to wiggle around because it's a big word? They never delivered on their promised hashrates, let alone even working GPU assist, so it very much is a scam. Acorns are borderline worthless and they just keep selling them hoping people in the community will feed them money for basically nothing.

[d57heinz]

Yup to most of that. I in no way, shape, or form will accept any of their deflection as to why they 'can't' deliver. I don't see GPUH going out of his way to actively look for developers. He half ass offered (not asked) to pay developers for their code, which was buried in chat. Never was pinned. Never made it to an announcement page. They don't even have any presence on BCT, one of the biggest resources for crypto development. It's not on their website that they're actively recruiting for development opportunities. It's like they're too proud to point out they need help.

At no point did it ever outwardly seem like they were asking for help and I haven't seen them formally even ask for it. Besides 'oh we could use some more developers' and literally everything burning down around them because of lack of software, which you're aware of if you purchased their hardware. Their current strategy for this is seemingly just to 'sell more hardware' to people who don't want it because they don't make it useful.

Currently we're on month two after release of FKs and still don't have meaningful bitstreams for them. I bought in for $30k worth of FKs and it's like they just expected me to disappear. Talk about things that are 'on the way', the same talk we received before FKs were released and the same talk we had with Acorns. This is just gross mismanagement and any time you point this out on discord it's met with either excuses or 'oh god the trolls are out again, why wont the mods do anything!??!'. Don't get me wrong, there is most definitely legitimate excuses, and there are also options to deal with those 'problems', like hiring freelance developers.

The crazy thing is, while you can talk about litigation and how GPUH talks about 'having to be hands off' with development of some things, that is absolute BS. He 100% can help someone without ever making it known that he's doing so. Either through a trusted source or literally just making a new username to contribute work.

That aside, if a person in the community which knows very little about actual bitstream programming can hire a developer and have something worked on, even if it never reached a very lucrative state because he didn't have the expertise to know what to request, they definitely can do the same thing. GPUH supposedly offered to pay for third party development, but Matt, the person who commissioned the work never got reimbursed for any of it. So more words without any bearing. The only way this all can be described is as hubris.


As far as being labeled a scam, which you're trying to wiggle around because it's a big word? They never delivered on their promised hashrates, let alone even working GPU assist, so it very much is a scam. Acorns are borderline worthless and they just keep selling them hoping people in the community will feed them money for basically nothing.

I’m trying to say this without being harsh. But I think is impossible.  You state full well that you were aware of the fiasco with the acorns.  Knowing all that and no software you still dumped 30k$ on some more bs from them.  If the community(that includes you) keeps feeding them money then why should they stop?   Power comes in your dollar.  Reinforcing bad behavior is what has set bitcoin back the last ten years.  Bad actors using it to scam thousands of people.  They want it to moon but they are the exact reason it won’t lol.  It’s a sad state to be in.  Wish you the best of luck.  Best better hire a lawyer and be able to show where you got the 30k$.  Otherwise you don’t have a leg to stand on. 

BR
Doug

[cryptolumos]

typical Masneb/Bensam with the post then delete lol

[bensam1231]

His entire post is victim shaming and hindsight common sense, nothing to reply to there, so I deleted my one sentence reply of just that. Nor is that my precedent anyway, hence why there are entire conversations of me talking with myself. Glad you're on topic though. roflmaobbqlolercopter

[Hueristic]

Yup to most of that. I in no way, shape, or form will accept any of their deflection as to why they 'can't' deliver. I don't see GPUH going out of his way to actively look for developers. He half ass offered (not asked) to pay developers for their code, which was buried in chat. Never was pinned. Never made it to an announcement page. They don't even have any presence on BCT, one of the biggest resources for crypto development. It's not on their website that they're actively recruiting for development opportunities. It's like they're too proud to point out they need help.

At no point did it ever outwardly seem like they were asking for help and I haven't seen them formally even ask for it. Besides 'oh we could use some more developers' and literally everything burning down around them because of lack of software, which you're aware of if you purchased their hardware. Their current strategy for this is seemingly just to 'sell more hardware' to people who don't want it because they don't make it useful.

Currently we're on month two after release of FKs and still don't have meaningful bitstreams for them. I bought in for $30k worth of FKs and it's like they just expected me to disappear. Talk about things that are 'on the way', the same talk we received before FKs were released and the same talk we had with Acorns. This is just gross mismanagement and any time you point this out on discord it's met with either excuses or 'oh god the trolls are out again, why wont the mods do anything!??!'. Don't get me wrong, there is most definitely legitimate excuses, and there are also options to deal with those 'problems', like hiring freelance developers.

The crazy thing is, while you can talk about litigation and how GPUH talks about 'having to be hands off' with development of some things, that is absolute BS. He 100% can help someone without ever making it known that he's doing so. Either through a trusted source or literally just making a new username to contribute work.

That aside, if a person in the community which knows very little about actual bitstream programming can hire a developer and have something worked on, even if it never reached a very lucrative state because he didn't have the expertise to know what to request, they definitely can do the same thing. GPUH supposedly offered to pay for third party development, but Matt, the person who commissioned the work never got reimbursed for any of it. So more words without any bearing. The only way this all can be described is as hubris.


As far as being labeled a scam, which you're trying to wiggle around because it's a big word? They never delivered on their promised hashrates, let alone even working GPU assist, so it very much is a scam. Acorns are borderline worthless and they just keep selling them hoping people in the community will feed them money for basically nothing.

Quoted because i think the bolded needs to be just that, bolded.
Nice post.

[kck146]

Does anyone like myself who has never used their acorns and has been denied a refund have any plans on how to recoup their losses? Is anyone pursuing legal action? Are you all getting coupons and ordering risers before the rebate period ends? If you’d rather not post publicly you can email me at squirrelanswers@gmail.com.

[cryptolumos]

Does anyone like myself who has never used their acorns and has been denied a refund have any plans on how to recoup their losses? Is anyone pursuing legal action? Are you all getting coupons and ordering risers before the rebate period ends? If you’d rather not post publicly you can email me at squirrelanswers@gmail.com.

great burner account, ckb has been great on acorns, the coupons worked well. Good luck with ur scam to get people to email you.

[ayiphelmy]

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

BULLSHIT!!!
THE MOST SCAMMERS IN 2019

[philipma1957]

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

BULLSHIT!!!
THE MOST SCAMMERS IN 2019

they never demoed a working product accelerating a gpu

[Hueristic]

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

BULLSHIT!!!
THE MOST SCAMMERS IN 2019

they never demoed a working product accelerating a gpu

Well I think we can plainly see what their word is worth.

I would support a flag on GPUHoarder.

[jharris265]

I am surprised there has not been any state or federal investigation into "Squirrls."

-Mail/Wire Fraud
-False advertising
-Crossing state lines in reference to the above

At any rate they need to be brought into a court of law to explain themselves under oath and under cross examination!

[miner29]

I am surprised there has not been any state or federal investigation into "Squirrls."

-Mail/Wire Fraud
-False advertising
-Crossing state lines in reference to the above

At any rate they need to be brought into a court of law to explain themselves under oath and under cross examination!

Did you even buy anything from Sqrl?

[jharris265]

I did buy some Acorns on the first release. I actually had some correspondence with Brian K. in customer support.
They respond by talking in circles and don't seem to care about the end user. Simply put, they lied to anyone who bought products.
If the damn software was not available as they promised, it should have never been advertised that way!
I requested a refund and was told to get in line:


'Squirrels Research Hardware support@squirrelsresearch.com via freshdesk.com
Nov 25, 2019, 3:00 PM
to me

Hi Josh,

I understand that you're upset. What I can do for you is place your request in the refund queue. These will be handled in order, and judged on a case by case basis. When we have the funds to start fulfilling refunds we will be in touch to let you know the progress of your request.



Thanka
Brian K.
SQRL Customer Support
On Mon, Nov 25 at 2:43 PM , Josh Harris <**********@mail.com> wrote:
At the time the refund was offered I still had faith that Squirrels could deliver on some very specific software that was widely advertised and made to look like it was available. I know the mining software is in an intellectual property dispute right now and that is where I lost the faith. There are others in the same camp as myself and I think I will encourage them to contact Federal and local agencies to investigate false advertising over state lines. I refuse to be jerked around any longer.

Thanks for your understanding."

[Hueristic]

I am surprised there has not been any state or federal investigation into "Squirrls."

-Mail/Wire Fraud
-False advertising
-Crossing state lines in reference to the above

At any rate they need to be brought into a court of law to explain themselves under oath and under cross examination!

Did you even buy anything from Sqrl?

miner29 <<-- Translation == sockpuppet

Veiled ad hominen attempt fail.