New firmware for antminer S9 - less power consumption

[SteveEsco]

installed the S9i and S9j FW versions to all my S9i's and S9j's - now to wait and see how it goes.

I don't see any special versions of the firmware for the S9j or i. Are you referring to the Antminer-S9-LPM-20181102.tar.gz firmware or am I missing it?

[minefarmbuy]

I don't see any special versions of the firmware for the S9j or i. Are you referring to the Antminer-S9-LPM-20181102.tar.gz firmware or am I missing it?

They're there. 20181107 versions for both models you mention.

[MoparMiningLLC]

They're there. 20181107 versions for both models you mention.

correct - once these are installed, you will see the LPM check box - they just didnt put "LPM" in the file name.

[dutchlincoln]

hi,
i see several post' of installing the LPM fw on top of FW "xxx".

Am i mistaken, as i thought the LPM firmware is a complete new firmware on its own? No need to pre-install any other firmware before this one?

If so, witch fw is the best to install before upgrading to the new LPM firmware?

Asicboost gives you a drop in power consumption while maintaining the same hashrate. If you really need the increase in hashrate, you can overclock by roughly the same percentage in order to bring the miner up to the previous power consumption, but with an increased hashrate. (Should be around 13% from what I've heard). For 14TH/s fixed freq miners I've been bumping them up from 650 to 706.25 MHz.

How did you increase the frequency? When i try the advanced menu and set a higher freq, the miner restarts naturally but goes to its same old "low" hashrate back...

[Coupee46]

How did you increase the frequency? When i try the advanced menu and set a higher freq, the miner restarts naturally but goes to its same old "low" hashrate back...

You need to flash the firmware with the 650 firmware. This is the firmware that allows for fixed FREQ changes, the one that mine came with was on auto FREQ so each time I changed the FREQ it would revert. But once I flashed it with the 650 Firmware, I was able to make the changes to the FREQ and saved on reboot. Then I applied the LPM update for giggles.

hi,
i see several post' of installing the LPM fw on top of FW "xxx".

Am i mistaken, as i thought the LPM firmware is a complete new firmware on its own? No need to pre-install any other firmware before this one?

If so, witch fw is the best to install before upgrading to the new LPM firmware?

Another user mentioned this on page 10:

All that the LPM "firmware" file contains is a modified bmminer and BOOT.bin. If you flash it to an autofreq miner, it will still be autofreq. Same for fixed frequency miners. You can confirm either by testing or just opening the LPM tar.gz with a program like 7zip, if you are on Windows.

This makes sense, because when you flash a firmware from prior releases the settings were defaulted, but with LPM my settings were never changed.  Hope that makes sense.  I was confused at first as well, since I never flashed my firmware until just this week, and I've had my miner for almost 11 months now.

[SidSlobber]

Ya, very weird.  I went ahead and changed the FREQ back, this time to 706.  Its been running for 1hr 45mn now, and I see 194 HW on one of the hash boards, total shows .0009%.  The fan speeds still shows; 4,440 and 3,600.  I did the fan speed trick again, and it still shows the value 85 when i unhide the fan-control settings lol.. strange.

Code:

Warning: Chain[J6] has no temp offset in PIC! will fix it

Fan PWM:50

Hi - From your varying fan speed results and your partial kernel log with PWM value of 50, your miner is clearly still on auto-tune fan speeds - so it is ignoring your manual fan settings - which should never happen.   That's strange as the "fixed-fan-speed" is standard Bitmain functionality that is available on all of the S9 firmware - all my "hack" did was to to make the manual option temporarily visible on the Miner Config page.   So I suspect something else has changed on your miner - e.g. the line in the kernel log about "no temp offset" value found stored in the pic controller doesn't look right for a normal S9, although that alone isn't the obvious cause as the software then did a fix and obtained a reasonable looking offset.   But it is suspicious nonetheless.   Did you "back out" the previous edits that you did to bmminer.conf or start from a clean firmware install before setting the manual speeds?   Although your bmminer.conf edit didn't appear to work, it may still have made some unpredictable changes.  

So, if you haven't already tried it, perhaps re-flash with a clean fixed-650 firmware (and LPM of course) and retry the fixed fan settings.  Or for even more "belt & braces" you could try a factory reset and re-flash firmware etc.   As mentioned manual fan control is a standard built-in (but hidden) Bitmain function so it should always work on any S9.

[dutchlincoln]

Hello,

I have flashed mostof my miners now with the 650 fixed frequency, and the LPM fw 11-02 afterwards. The results in hashrate vary from miner to miner, but sometimes up to 1.5TH between fastest and lowest.

Are there any tips, or do-donts in order to set frequency's?
Most of them wont go higher as 675. I have a few that accept 686.5, but more is not feasible.
When i use the rocket mod FW of Taserz,i get up to 16.5Th with stock psu, so the hashboards are capable to do these frequencies... (that is at 750M, 775M)

Looking forward to hear your results, and maybe learn a few extra tricks... 

Thanks.

Hi, with a lot of fiddling i got it to work again.

What my findings are, is that the miners with lpm firmware dont seem to like very low temperatures. Anyone can confirm?
Hashrate is slowing down, becomes erratic, and finally it shows that its hashing but its not, giving a temp on the first board of 15 degrees centigrade...
My other miners that are in a confined space thats a little warmer, i dont have these issues.

My findings are for 3 miners now (out of 4, that are colder) and i have about 6 that are in a warmer spot.

Anyone that has the same issues?

edit: i flashed them with 650 freq. firmware, and lpm 02-11 on top of it. Highest setting i get them to work with, is 668mhz on one, and most of the others at 662. few 650 only.

[darksaint77]

Hello, I have difficulty determining which firmware I am currently / Photo 1 shows the screen on my S9 13.5 / and whether I need to install any of the updates shown on picture 2 before installing the latest ASIC Boost Update ...

photo 1: https://i.imgur.com/xylq9CS.jpg

photo 2: https://i.imgur.com/QvBKGln.jpg

[dutchlincoln]

All n all i have flashed almost all my miners to the 650ff fw and the LMP fw on top of it.
My personal findings, are that this firmware is nice, it saves some power, but its verrrry buggy still.
I have miners that wont mine stable, miners that wont run due being too cold, miners that wont simply connect to some pools, some run fine for 3 days, but wont do a thing anymore after a reboot (for whatever reason)

So, in the end, saving a few watts is nice, but it comes with a high price in time and effort to set it up, but also to keep it running afterwards.

Same thing can be done with Taserz S9 rocket mod firmware (no DEV fee) and it works a lot more stable...

Strange that Bitmain can't seem to get it to work...

[minefarmbuy]

My updates went fine for my s9i and s9 auto tune. No issues, hash rates are good 13.7 and 14.

[dutchlincoln]

Maybe its the autotune then...
I had the autotune on some, and they were underclocked... Ranging from 12.7 to 13.5 on 13.5 S9's

So, i did what most advised: flash the 650 fixed frequency. This gives unstable outcomes...

I dont want my miners to hash slower.... So no autotune for me...

[thierry4wd]

UP ! Bitmain Release new firmware for S9I / S9J and say :

"Add support for low power mode, reduce power consumption."

Any people try it ?

[MoparMiningLLC]

UP ! Bitmain Release new firmware for S9I / S9J and say :

"Add support for low power mode, reduce power consumption."

Any people try it ?

I have tried it on both the S9i and S9j and have zero issues so far. they are hashing same as before - I do not have a way to measure power consumption though other than waiting for the months bill to see if it drops.

[thierry4wd]

Any additional option ?

[MoparMiningLLC]

Any additional option ?

such as? LPM is as simple as that, LPM only - if you want to adjust freq and such, that still has to be done the same way as it was done before and is also dependent upon which firmware you install prior to the LPM update.

[thierry4wd]

Yes of course, I knew that very well lol I just wanted to know if he proposed something new;)

[MoparMiningLLC]

Yes of course, I knew that very well lol I just wanted to know if he proposed something new;)

I think I lost what you are asking - you stated "If he proposed something new" - do you mean Bitmain?

[SidSlobber]

I have tried it on both the S9i and S9j and have zero issues so far. they are hashing same as before - I do not have a way to measure power consumption though other than waiting for the months bill to see if it drops.

I just tried this new Antminer-S9i-xilinx-201811271554-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz on a S9i 14 and a S9i 13.5.    Very bad results for both of them - it certainly reduced the power considerably  on both of them and as a result also hugely reduced the hash rate from 14 to 9.5 and 13.5 to 7.5.   Plus because of the low chain voltage it was clocking up lots of HW errors.   So I obviously flashed them both back to the 201811071119 FW.

The only difference in the firmware that I can see is that it introduces a new chain backup voltage of 8.00v for all boards that (at least on the 2 miners I tested) is overriding the voltages stored on each boards PIC controller e.g. the PICs have 8.9v, 8.9v & 8.7v on one of my S9i 13.5s - hence the significantly lower power, rubbish hash-rate and increased HW errors.  e.g. the only frequency my S9i 14.0 could manage to get up to was 493 instead of it's normal 650.  Even worse because it was clocking errors and didn't seem stable at 8v, the real RT hash-rate was a lot less than the ideal (which is based on the freq) e.g. on a S9i 13.5, RT = 7500, Ideal = 9500  - RT was around 13650 before this FW - so it's only hashing at 55% of it's normal rate.

I'm not sure why Bitmain released a second asicboost FW for the S9i's or what the difference is between the two versions - nothing on Twitter etc - anyone seen a Bitmain explanation anywhere?  The description next to the firmware has changed from

"1. Reduce power consumption."  

to

 "1. Add support for low power mode, reduce power consumption".    

I think a few of us of assumed that the LPM option didn't do anything on the initial asciboost FWs.  Maybe Bitmain have enabled it now.   Maybe unticking LPM on the General Settings screen will stop it selecting the very low (and unstable) backup voltage - it's late here - so I'll try one tomorrow. Stryfe - you said yours are hashing normally - did you have LPM ticked?  

If this is meant to be a more efficient Low Power Mode, it's not working for me as the % drop in hashrate is more then the drop in power so it's less efficient, more unstable and I'd need to install more miners to get my total hash-rate back to where it was before.
 
I didn't unplug any miners to check the precise power drop, but the PDU amps dropped by around 1.5a (350w) - which won't be precise because there are other miners on that PDU.

such as? LPM is as simple as that, LPM only - if you want to adjust freq and such, that still has to be done the same way as it was done before and is also dependent upon which firmware you install prior to the LPM update.

You can't adjust the frequencies on the S9i/j's with Bitmain firmware - there are no fixed freq FWs listed for these miners.  There are other ways of doing it with 3rd party firmware.  Also there is no dependency on the prior firmware as you mention with this LPM update.

The S9i and S9j asicboost FWs are complete replacement firmware's - so they will just totally overwrite the previous firmware.  If you look at the various FW sizes for the S9 and S9i/j it is obvious.  My posts earlier in this thread explaining about applying the LPM FW on top of a fixed FW only applied to the S9 - which only had a small "patch" LPM FW upgrade which was applied "on top".   It doesn't work that way for the S9i/j - unless someone wants to risk trying the S9 firmware's on the S9i/j's.

Hello, I have difficulty determining which firmware I am currently / Photo 1 shows the screen on my S9 13.5 / and whether I need to install any of the updates shown on picture 2 before installing the latest ASIC Boost Update ...

photo 1: https://i.imgur.com/xylq9CS.jpg

photo 2: https://i.imgur.com/QvBKGln.jpg

Almost certainly (99.9%) you an on a slightly older version of Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz.  

This is the autotune / autofreq FW.  You don't have to load any other firmware first unless you want to try over-clocking your miner - so just go ahead and apply the S9 LPM firmware i.e.  Antminer-S9-LPM-20181102.tar.gz, although it would be better to get your miner up-to-date first by flashing it with Antminer-S9-all-201711171757-autofreq-user-Update2UBI-NF.tar.gz if you want to stay on autotune before applying the LPM update.

If you want to be absolutely sure what FW you are you can post your full kernel log and I'll be able to confirm 100%.

[MoparMiningLLC]

ahh, I take back what I said - I was not aware of the 11/27 version - I am running the one from 11/07

[big_daddy]

if you have the C5 boards on your Antminer the firmware is not compatible with your machine    

https://i.imgur.com/tCeP9pc.jpg

so, my results are just the same as yesterday  

update on this models:

with this firmware Antminer-S9-LPM-20181102.tar I'm getting a stable 13,6 TH/s on 1.250 W from the wall and temp chips from 66 to 69 C°