FPGA development board "Icarus" - DisContinued/ important announcement

[pieppiep]

IIRC there is an Intel openCL driver that just uses the cpu.
It won't be fast like a GPU, but I guess it's just for devellopers to test stuff.
It would be enough for you I think.

[Turbor]

Not sure how to compile it manually....
I guess it would be easier for me to install OpenCL. Where would I download just the OpenCL? I know it is included in the AMD stream SDK or the AMD driver package.

If you have an AMD/ATI graphics card, just install the latest driver.  If you don't, then you'll have to research how to get an OpenCL driver for whatever you do have.

It is a laptop. It has an old Intel integrated graphics. Not sure if there is support for it.

Try "disable-opencl" : true, in the conf file. I switched back to MPBM because the board locked itself up more than once with cgminer. So, it does work but it's not perfect yet !

[kano]

Went to the trouble of doing a little analysis of the Icarus performance

(Edit: using the simplistic assumption T = nH + W
where T = time, n = number of hashes, H = time per hash, W = software overhead)

Basically by generating a line of best fit using least squares.

Hash (H) time per hash (or pair) is 5.26ns (consistently across tests)
Thus MH/s is 380.23 (similar as stated by others)

Using my cgminer code the issue I though might be the actual overhead of setup and getting an answer (W) and that came out as ~0.014s ... or ~5.3MH
Since the average number of hashes per nonce is 2^32
Then you expect to waste 5.3x10^6 with every 4.3x10^9 Hashes or ~0.12% or roughly 0.5MH/s
So not much of an issue

Again with the above figures you get the nonce range time as 11.296 seconds (similar as stated by others)

Time now to optimise the constants in cgminer ...

[allinvain]

Hmm, it would be really cool if you released a Windows binary of cgminer with builtin Icarus support. Last time I tried the latest windows build it failed to work in spite of some people saying that supposedly icarus support is now enabled.

[Turbor]

It is working but not too stable for me with win7. I had 2 BSOD (bluescreen of death) in a row. I had to switch back to MPBM.

[xiangfu]

Seems your win7 is not very stable.      (just kidding)

It is working but not too stable for me with win7. I had 2 BSOD (bluescreen of death) in a row. I had to switch back to MPBM.

[rudrigorc2]

Awesome and psychedelic - scrolling that up and down the screen makes me dizzy.

I just read this and totally agree! LOL!  Heavy shit.

Btw, I received today my 3rd batch icarus, its running fine! Awesome stuff!

[P_Shep]

Can someone tell me the vendor and product ID of the serial USB chip used in the Icarus? It's a prolific isn't it?

[Doff]

USB to Serial PL2303: http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?id=31

[P_Shep]

I need the USB vendor / product ID.

[randomguy7]

I need the USB vendor / product ID.

idVendor           0x067b Prolific Technology, Inc.
idProduct          0x2303 PL2303 Serial Port

[P_Shep]

I need the USB vendor / product ID.

idVendor           0x067b Prolific Technology, Inc.
idProduct          0x2303 PL2303 Serial Port

Perfect, thanks

[Icoin]

Hi, did someone allready tried the icarus board with p2pool? It seems that not all FPGA boards are p2pool compatible (at least the rumors say something about xtec).

Allso i would like to know if industry or commercial standart spartan6 was used for the icarus board

[randomguy7]

Hi, did someone allready tried the icarus board with p2pool? It seems that not all FPGA boards are p2pool compatible (at least the rumors say something about xtec).
...

I've been running Icarus with p2pool for some time, worked like a charm.

[DeepBit]

Allso i would like to know if industry or commercial standart spartan6 was used for the icarus board :)

Industry.

[kano]

Hi, did someone allready tried the icarus board with p2pool? It seems that not all FPGA boards are p2pool compatible (at least the rumors say something about xtec).
...

The requirements to effectively use FPGA on P2Pool are that they do at least one of:
A ) Report shares as soon as they are found
B ) Allow a nonce-range to be processed instead of the full range
C ) Can abort work
D ) Can poll share status (close to A ) but does waste on average half the poll time per share)

Of the 4 above, A ) and B ) are the best.
If an FPGA only does C ) then you are still wasting a lot of work, but not as much as an FPGA that does none of the 4

I have no idea if any FPGA supports B ) yet.

Icarus supports A ) and C ) so any software that takes advantage of them both will be best to use on P2Pool

BFL only supports C ) so far.

Ztex supports C ) and D ) so thus would also be OK for P2Pool

I have no idea about the others yet.

I think they all support C ) and without C ) it is also pretty bad due to wasted work after an LP happens
(i.e. the point about P2Pool is it has 60 times the number of LP's as a normal 1 difficulty share pool)

Edit: Updated with "D )" and Ztex

[nelisky]

The requirements to effectively use FPGA on P2Pool are that they do at least one of:
A ) Report shares as soon as they are found
B ) Allow a nonce-range to be processed instead of the full range
C ) Can abort work

Ztex does something very close to A (there's no interrupt to state a share was found, but it will be reported on poll which we do constantly) and aborts work as per C.

[kano]

Updated it

[Icoin]

cool ty

[rudrigorc2]

It is working but not too stable for me with win7. I had 2 BSOD (bluescreen of death) in a row. I had to switch back to MPBM.

I'm in win7 for now and had 2 bsod, one with cgminer 2.3.3 and ozcoin(bad pool header), default miner.py does not even run @ozcoin

and on some random I forgot the bsod message