GekkoScience is finally building a 16nm Pod Miner

[sidehack]

I know what you're thinking. This post is going up April 1 and you can't trust anything you see on April 1

Well you're wrong.



(homemade samples of case branding/labeling)

I still need to do some fine-tuning on the housing, and slap a big fat logo on it, but this here is a fully functional prototype of the all-new Terminus R606, building on the work of both the R808 and NewPac USB and progressing in secret since January.

The theoretical peak hashrate of this guy is upwards of 1100GH but that's not guaranteed, and may require a fan upgrade.  This fellow is designed for cool, quiet and convenient. Worry not that it's a wimp, though, because the stock settings should get you upwards of 600GH (close to 700GH with ASICBoost enabled) from a 12V 5A power brick. My tester is pulling 820GH from 12V/6.1A right now with a heatsink temperature of 50C and I almost can't hear it running.

R808 users will notice a few obvious improvements over the original. First and foremost, it's completely enclosed. Makes it quite a bit safer and easier to handle, for sure. Second, dual heatsinks. Cooling is much more effective. Third, standard 80mm quiet case fan is easy to upgrade without having to track down exotic hardware, and it also cools the Vcore regulator for improved overclock stability.

The familar jacks are still present - USBA 5V output for powering a small controller, plus 12V in from a barrel (8A rated, upgraded from the 5A jack on the R808) and 6-pin PCIe. Next we've got a nifty new feature, push-button voltage control. Instead of having to turn a knob and guess at your settings or dig for a meter, now you can adjust from 390mV/chip to 460mV/chip in 10mV increments with the push of a button, and your current setting is counted off on the 3-bit binary LEDs. (yes there'll be a user guide with further details on this feature)

This is not a for-sale announcement, but we're prepping to start manufacture literally right now and they should be shipping soon. I don't have any in-house sales rep this time around, so talk to your favorite reseller and let 'em know you're interested.

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[rockmoney]

We will be taking orders for the new pod miners, so please feel free to inquire within, or contact us via our new storefront here: www.amazon.com/shops/MinersSupply

[NotFuzzyWarm]

It's looking good! Who's chips are in it? Bitfury's?

[wttbs]

Job well done ! I do appreciate people taking effort to bring back mining at home.

[philipma1957]

This will look good next to my ltc Apollo’s.

Coins are way up today this should be nice to add for summer mining in the garage.

[BitMaxz]

Such low power consumption and high hash rate how about the future price
Is it also required KFC verified when ordering and shipping this machine?

Happy April fools day!

[sidehack]

Price is TBD. I'll probably be doing more coordination with resellers regarding an MSRP and the like but those negotiations largely haven't happened yet.

As far as I know, no KYC (or fried chicken) is required for buying from anyone I distribute to.

I may open limited direct sales on these, depending on who I know that needs a job, but won't make any promises. For now the safe bet is to talk to your preferred reseller.

[nuanicaj]

Price is TBD. I'll probably be doing more coordination with resellers regarding an MSRP and the like but those negotiations largely haven't happened yet.

As far as I know, no KYC (or fried chicken) is required for buying from anyone I distribute to.

I may open limited direct sales on these, depending on who I know that needs a job, but won't make any promises. For now the safe bet is to talk to your preferred reseller.

Who's chips are being utilized in this shiny new miner?

[sidehack]

the all-new Terminus R606, building on the work of both the R808 and NewPac USB

[nuanicaj]

the all-new Terminus R606, building on the work of both the R808 and NewPac USB

Some more details please on the new miner?

[philipma1957]

I want one.

[Bez]

The 606 may not be made with Bitfury chips, but I'm still planning on orange.

You are exactly right about the reason. We are GekkoScience, after all.

I don't see any orange!

[sidehack]

The power light is orange. My primary PCB supplier doesn't have an orange soldermask option and arranging it would have been super expensive while also going mostly unseen.

[minefarmbuy]

It's beautiful. Do you recommend your USB hub for multiples?

[sidehack]

You'll have to be more specific, because I have no idea in what case a USB splitter would be useful for this device.


Ok, question edited for more clarity. Using my hub would be kind of a waste, because this guy draws almost exactly zero power from USB, but yes given the limitations of USB I believe you should be able to run at least 3 up to absolute maximum speed from a single source. (assuming ASICBoost is enabled, which is required to reach top speeds anyway)

[minefarmbuy]

Sorry my session timed out before I could edit. So any USB A hub can connect a few of these then?

I'm an edit fiend today.

Thoughts on https://www.tripplite.com/usb-hub-10-port-hi-speed-2.0~U223010

https://www.tripplite.com/rugged-industrial-usb-2.0-high-speed-hub-15kv-esd-immunity-metal-case-mountable-4-port~U223004IND

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Those Tripplite industrial hubs are very nice. We use them on our systems as they are built like a tank, near bullet-proof, have tighter than normal plug retention plus can be fed off of our 24vdc system buss.

[sidehack]

A comment on USB.

As implied by that these are built on NewPac tech, this board features Bitmain BM1387 (S9) ASICs. Bitmain chips don't have much of a work buffer, and when initialized each chip in the data chain is addressed in such a way that the nonce range is divided up somewhat evenly amongst them. If I understand correctly, the address basically becomes the upper-byte starting point for each chip to parse the 32-bit nonce range. Once that range has been exhausted, in order to prevent wasted work, a fresh pile of data needs to be sent in pretty quickly.

USB2.0 can transfer enormous amounts of data rather quickly using bulk transfer packets. However, the number of packets of any size transferred per second is limited. Because Bitmain chips can't pre-buffer work, and because each chip gets a portion of the load (as opposed to say Innosilicon chips, which can buffer two unique work units per ASIC), fresh work has to be pushed in in fairly small increments rather quickly. This uses up a lot of really small packets, and maxes out the limits of the bus at around 800GH. I think this is the maximum hashrate one could achieve even with multiple devices on the same hub.

When ASICBoost is enabled, the amount of work data delivered to the chips increases slightly but because each work unit is fully parsed with four unique midstates, the practical effect is work units only need to be updated one fourth as often. Because of timing constraints and increased packet sizes, VH's implementation updates work about 1/3.2 as often, so the maximum hashrate from a single USB connection is roughly 2.6GH which means two or three pods should be able to function at high speed off one hub like this.

Limitations like that are probably a primary reason why Bitmain shifted to a fancier controller board with an FPGA buffering work and doling it out on multiplexed serial lines. When a 32-bit nonce range is divided amongst 60-70 chips it gets burned through pretty quickly.

For future higher-hashrate projects we'll either have to look into board-level work buffering to ease the USB load (and require some pretty fancy firmware) or work with different chips with a more bus-efficient work buffering mechanism (like almost all of them besides Bitmain).

[Valnurat]

Why is it possible to by when you live in Europe?

[minefarmbuy]

Impossible? I though there were vendors in Germany. Otherwise, I'm sure there are plenty who can export to you.