[ANN] Spondoolies-Tech - carrier grade, data center ready mining rigs

[majestymage]

I don't think it would be hard for SPT to put one of the hashboards ~11 TH in a SP10 type enclosure.   

It wouldn't but I doubt they care to. What would be interested is if they licensed someone else to make a smaller miner using their chips so they don't have to be bothered with tech support or manufacturing.

this is their baby...why would they do that?

[1714840122]

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[1714840122]

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[alienesb]

I don't think it would be hard for SPT to put one of the hashboards ~11 TH in a SP10 type enclosure.   

It wouldn't but I doubt they care to. What would be interested is if they licensed someone else to make a smaller miner using their chips so they don't have to be bothered with tech support or manufacturing.

this is their baby...why would they do that?

Motivations of bitcoin mining companies are mysterious... but probably the money if they could make more doing this than mining.

[fullzero]

I think they will only SP40 up; if the USD / BTC exchange rate increases and makes it worth their while.

[jtoomim]

Toomim Bros may be arranging something with our group buy where we take single SP50s and split them up into shares by using cgminer load balancing between pools.

Still waiting to hear back from Spondoolies about pricing and MOQ and whatnot. They'll be asleep for another 10 hours, but I might get a response tonight.

Please send an email to orders@toom.im if you're interested.

Edit: This will not be happening any time soon.

[Medow]

What country are these shipping from?

I have the same question, it will be shipped  from Israel or other country?

[jjiimm_64]

KNC has said a lot of things, many of them false.  Take it with a mine of salt...

I think it's very safe to say we can trust the word of a company like SP-Tech, they have been nothing but forthcoming and honest with us miners, with the only exception being the slight stretch on SP20's published hashrate

agree with this...  and the hell with KNC, they went private mining route anyway right?

[jtoomim]

I have the same question, it will be shipped  from Israel or other country?

I think my NDA is expired now. Right, Guy?

They will be shipped in two separate shipments. One by ocean, one by air. The ocean shipment will include the chassis, controller, and the PSUs. The air freight will include the hashboards and heatsinks. I believe that both will originate in Israel, but I don't have hard evidence on that.

[TheRealSteve]

These are small chips now though, 7x7mm compared to 19x19mm and 20W compared to ~60W. A 1A USB miner would be ~30GH.

The size isn't really an issue - if the big chips were 0.05" pitch QFPs, I'd imagine they'd pop back onto the radar (even if the typical power use would remain discouraging).  He mostly abhors BGAs; especially fine pitch umpteendozen/hundred ball BGAs.  This is a CSP which typically means there'll be a BGA or LGA style physical interface to the actual chip, in which case the pitch/ball count is what matters the most.  Even at 0.5mm pitch and unpopulated areas, that's a lot of balls, many of which difficult to inspect.  Would be unnecessary hit/miss soldering jobs, or having to choose to outsource board population for just that part.

[2GOOD]

Hell Yeah... Bitcoin Mining GONE BIG... like REALLY BIG 
A common name for this piece of equipment will be: SP50 Dozer or Excavator lol this is big. In the opposite direction I still hope SPT to reconsider their decision and produce smaller, home friendly miners for the average Joe. It's too early to take out bitcoin mining from the masses.

[Biodom]

Hell Yeah... Bitcoin Mining GONE BIG... like REALLY BIG  
A common name for this piece of equipment will be: SP50 Dozer or Excavator lol this is big. In the opposite direction I still hope SPT to reconsider their decision and produce smaller, home friendly miners for the average Joe. It's too early to take out bitcoin mining from the masses.

they won't. somehow they set on this (erroneous, in my opinion) path a while ago.
emulating bitfury/knc basically (with better intentions, perhaps).

[dogie]

Hell Yeah... Bitcoin Mining GONE BIG... like REALLY BIG 
A common name for this piece of equipment will be: SP50 Dozer or Excavator lol this is big. In the opposite direction I still hope SPT to reconsider their decision and produce smaller, home friendly miners for the average Joe. It's too early to take out bitcoin mining from the masses.

they won't. somehow they set on this (erroneous, in my opinion) path a while ago.
emulating bitfury/knc basically (with better intentions, perhaps).

Except those companies pay their debts (mostly).

[praeluceo]

For reference, at the current cost of the Bitmain S7 (roughly 1.6 BTC/TH), the SP50's hashrate would cost 181.29 BTC (~$41,700). The S7 is not capable of breaking even at that price before the halving, and does not include PSUs, so it isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. What would be a better comparison, is against the SP20, new cost, when it was launched. The SP20 was 0.87 BTC/TH (ironically cheaper than the S7, despite launching when difficulty was -way- lower). So at SP20 costs, the SP50 would be only 96.75 BTC, or ~$22,252.

So if we estimate a price of 100 BTC for the rig, and if we estimate a 5% difficulty rise on average (currently lower, likely will be much higher as S7s and SP50s hit the market), at 8 cents per kWh and on a 0% fee pool, we have a potential break-even day of March 25th in what I can only call super-ideal-circumstances.

Now, if Spondoolies prices this more in-line with current hardware, and it costs upward of 125 BTC to order, it will no longer break-even before the halving, and since some people have estimated its price around $40k, at that point the device does not break-even and maintains a negative ROI.

What we are looking at, is a fundamental shift in mining strategy, because even at industrial scale (which is what an 11U 180V miner is), operators must be very careful with their capital investments and on-going costs to ensure everything remains profitable, or reaches a positive ROI before June of 2016. Likewise, even if the exchange rate doubles on the day of the halving, that still doesn't help because at these expenses, you can't afford to be an irrational miner. If you are looking to light up 1 PH of hardware today, you have 2 choices:

1) If you think Bitcoin's exchange value is going to remain constant at the halving. Pay no more for the hardware than can break-even before the halving, and ensure your operating expenses can stay below your income level after that date.
2) If you think Bitcoin's exchange value is going to go up at the halving. Having capital tied up in non-liquid mining hardware that is so large it has minimal resale opportunities is an irrational move. It would make more sense to  take your investment into Bitcoin directly, and monetize your investment through more traditional means.

But if you're in camp #1, you're not likely to be interested in mining Bitcoin, and you are still sitting on a very expensive asset, which has a lot of operational costs associated with it as well, which you'll have to figure out how to sell later to recoup your costs (or consider them truly sunk once it is no longer efficient enough to mine with at your power costs).

So, unless  this is 100 BTC or less, it just doesn't seem rational to buy it. As it stands, as a "prosumer" miner, I'll put an inquiry in to find out what the MOQ is, but I have existing miners eating up some of my capacity, so I would first have to sell those to free up enough room to run the SP50, or find other individuals who can afford a single rig, but not the MOQ. I can't imagine there are many though, even one miner will be a substantial outlay at 100 BTC, and that's likely far less than Spondoolies wants for it.

[AmityGames]

Q: Now, what kind of company announces an amazing product but does not suggest a price for it?

A: A company who is uncertain of demand and price points

IMHO, Spondoolies has a small number of working prototypes of the SP50 and is trying to figure out how to gear up for production. They may have just barely enough demand from their hosting/merger partners to get production off the ground, and are naturally looking for ways to milk the wider market beyond at the highest price it can bear (with optimists leading the way of course).

This is marginally better than KnC, who's been stuffing every ASIC at hand in their Swedish facility guarded by buxom blondes with machine guns

Technically, I trust Spondoolies to deliver. I have looked at the guts and firmware of all their machines extensively. As an EECS myself, I think their implementation is indeed best in class (better than Bitmain and KNC). One suggestion - do not affix the heatsinks with an epoxy bead (a la SP20).

Economically, I would not pay much more than 1.0-1.2 BTC per TH for ANY new miner. At present BTC rates, this puts the economically feasible price for the SP50 around $25,000 per unit.

Pay more than that, and you are unlikely to see any ROI - which is kinda the point of the whole thing if you are a professional operator with access to low cost electricity.
 

Hi there,

I didn't know you cared for mining. Nice to see.

I think producers are forcing customers to realize that ROI in less than a year is not realistic any more. But with cheap electricity these new machines should be profitable for far longer than previous generations of asics. The nm race is grinding to a halt, and even if there is a breakthrough in that field it will take 2-4 years for it to make it to production.

Thanks.

Would you invest your money in mining if the baseline ROI was 1-2 years or more?

The VCs who are funding the large mining ops are definitely looking at much faster paybacks. The rational ones at least....

I'm worried about a new difficulty race. Spondoolies needs to sell only ~3000 SP50 to double the network difficulty and halve the yield (that's on top of the reward halving in June).

On the semi side, it's not that hard nowadays to step down to 20 or even 16 nm. The fab capacity and technical expertise is there, readily available.

If I had a good setup I wouldn't hesitate. That is, if I had a guaranteed access to a low cost facility and guaranteed cheap electricity. Now is the best time to do it, as the network will grow and the halving will keep overinvestment in the field at bay (I hope) you have a good chance to ROI (in terms of BTC) most of the costs (depending on the price of the blimmin miners, of course) before the halving. I do believe the BTC price has hit bottom. And I do believe it will pick up within the next 6 months. But if it stays sub $1000 for the next couple of years I would be much more comfortable with mining than speculating.

With regards to 20nm I don't know if it's relevant anymore. As I understood there were some minor efficiency advantages over 28nm, but its main advantage was the ability to run chips at higher frequencies with less leakage. I guess that's attractive if your chip designs focuses on a few massive chips, like with the KnC Neptune, rather than lots of smaller ones. But with the 14/16nm chips it will be interesting to see, if we ever get some confirmed power specs on Bitfurys, KnCs or LKETCs 14/16nm machines, how much there is to squeeze out of those processes.

I think Bitfurys claimed 0.06J/GH figure is not strictly down to fab process. They've been tweaking their chips for efficiency since day 1 and clearly have an advantage in this regard. But if it is mostly down to fab process it's worth to note that the difference in efficiency between 0.07J/GH and the specs for the SP50 is as large as between the antminer S5 and the first KnC machines, percentagewise.

In any event I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Thanks.

Where BTC price will go is anybody's guess. It's like trying to predict the stock market or turbulence. You can't.

What you can do however is to make evaluations of a given investment subject to certain level of risk. This is standard operating procedure in engineering or finance. You don't make your plans based on an optimistic outcome (no matter how much you believe that BTC will go up).

For my planning, I usually do a status quo scenario (BTC price and difficulty remain roughly the same, after all they've been like this for almost an year), a conservative change scenario (BTC price at $200 a nice round number, difficulty grows to reflect new capacity going online) and a bad scenario (BTC collapses sub-50, difficulty at 1 bil). The last one tells you how much you have at risk. The first two give you a reasonable estimate of your return.

This is how the VCs who fund the private ops of KnC, BitFury, SPO...etc look at the economics and pricing. If you look at their decisions, nobody seems to be anticipating a rise in BTC prices. This being said, the last 9 months have been sweet for mining, which is exactly what they've been doing with their own hardware. The situation may change though.... so beware jumping on the SP50 or the S7.

I think the 16 nm press releases from KnC and Bitfury with their reported 0.06J/GH are mostly BS, or lab results that will be difficult to scale fast. This kind of PR is intended to scare/delay capacity expansion, since these guys have the most to gain from the sweet mining status quo above.

With regard to tech, your efficiency grows as the inverse square of gate length (all other things being equal). You do have a hard limit on clock speed, but afaik none of the ASICS operates close to it - as far as I can see, all the designs are constrained today by thermal dissipation limits.

Which is why the only tangible advances on the open market so far are based on undercloking the true-and-tried 28 nm process. If your electrical design is already ironed out, it's not very expensive to order incremental runs from TSMC as long as the latter have the fab still available (and 28 nm tech is very mainstream now). So, you cram many ASICS, run them underclocked, and voila - you have the S7 or the SP50.

When the likes of TSMC step down their fabs to 20 nm or 16 nm (and this will be driven very much by the likes of Intel, not Spondoolies) you will get these improvements almost immediately in the bitcoin space. This is likely to happen sooner rather than later - look up Intel's or TSMC official plans and you'll see where the tech is heading. IMHO, this will happen around the time of reward halving...

[alh]

My $.02:

I think anybody who assumes a low difficulty rate increase going forward is deluding themselves. While the last 6 months have only been about 25% (for just 6 months), the last 12 months is more like 100% growth in difficulty. I think the golden summer is drawing to a close. I too think it's silly to make predictions about BTC price, but I am confident that BTC difficulty will continue to rise. Perhaps more slowly than a year ago, but still at a breathtaking rate compared to any other industry.

In terms of SP50 pricing, Bitmain has provided a lot of "cover" for Spondoolies. Just given an equivalent $$$/TH, Spondoolies could price the SP50 at $40,000 and still be undercutting the S7 (which needs a PSU). The SP50 has better efficiency and better operational deployment for the "Professional Miner" (extracted from their announcement). I have no idea what it costs to manufacture an SP50, I doubt it shows up for less than $40K.

Nice and speculative for me, since either is a nogo personally.

[AJRGale]

well what do you know, another item to centralise bitcoins.. all we need is 2 or 3 warehouses in china doing mining, forget the idea of splitting it up over people.. And all this is going to do is increase the difficulty to unreachable heights, rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Its going to take me more then 11,000 years to hash a block, 1 year ago, only 11 years, year before that, about 6 months. you know what will stop this? mega-hashing "companies" go bye bye..

You'd think there is more profit in making little pod miners for the masses then massive rack units that require industrial grade power supply, yes?
and if anyone says "but the U3 didn't sell well" it had a major bug, that never got fixed, no one wanted to buy it.

look at the usb block eruptor, they are still selling! but nooo, lets make industrial grade miners and forget the little people, they can go "cloud" mine off someone.

so, tell me people, what will happen when the 3 major ASIC companies go bust when BTC drops price again?(begging  the question, i know) back to CPU/GPU mining for us.

am I the only one to be angry at this? that these ASIC companies listen to the ones with the big racks and cash?

enough of my ranting.

[notlist3d]

well what do you know, another item to centralise bitcoins.. all we need is 2 or 3 warehouses in china doing mining, forget the idea of splitting it up over people.. And all this is going to do is increase the difficulty to unreachable heights, rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Its going to take me more then 11,000 years to hash a block, 1 year ago, only 11 years, year before that, about 6 months. you know what will stop this? mega-hashing "companies" go bye bye..

You'd think there is more profit in making little pod miners for the masses then massive rack units that require industrial grade power supply, yes?
and if anyone says "but the U3 didn't sell well" it had a major bug, that never got fixed, no one wanted to buy it.

look at the usb block eruptor, they are still selling! but nooo, lets make industrial grade miners and forget the little people, they can go "cloud" mine off someone.

so, tell me people, what will happen when the 3 major ASIC companies go bust when BTC drops price again?(begging  the question, i know) back to CPU/GPU mining for us.

am I the only one to be angry at this? that these ASIC companies listen to the ones with the big racks and cash?

enough of my ranting.

I'm hoping they left the sp40 area for home miners or at least smaller gear.  This is massive and I just am curious on the price of it.  But I do see a market for it, so I can't really be mad they made a miner for the "big guys".

I just hopefully we see a smaller version.   Guess we will have to wait and see.

[AJRGale]

...

I'm hoping they left the sp40 area for home miners or at least smaller gear.  This is massive and I just am curious on the price of it.  But I do see a market for it, so I can't really be mad they made a miner for the "big guys".

I just hopefully we see a smaller version.   Guess we will have to wait and see.

probably wont, they dropped the sp20 for the big guns long ago, they abandoned the home miners then.

[2112]

This is a CSP which typically means there'll be a BGA or LGA style physical interface to the actual chip, in which case the pitch/ball count is what matters the most.  Even at 0.5mm pitch and unpopulated areas, that's a lot of balls, many of which difficult to inspect.  Would be unnecessary hit/miss soldering jobs, or having to choose to outsource board population for just that part.

The soldering difficulty is way overstated for the mining chips. It is true that the BGA packages have hundreds of contact points. But with a halfway-intelligent design those BGA pads can be easily made quadruple-redundant with double spacing of no-contact pads in-between.

Then the expensive precision placing & soldering & x-ray testing will not be necessary.

All this of course assumes an intelligent designer.

Bad pinout example:

Code:

+-+-+-+-+
-+-+-+-+-
+-+-+-+-+
-+-+-+-+-

Good pinout example:

Code:

.........
.++..--..
.++..--..
.........

[klondike_bar]

well what do you know, another item to centralise bitcoins.. all we need is 2 or 3 warehouses in china doing mining, forget the idea of splitting it up over people.. And all this is going to do is increase the difficulty to unreachable heights, rich get richer, poor get poorer.

Its going to take me more then 11,000 years to hash a block, 1 year ago, only 11 years, year before that, about 6 months. you know what will stop this? mega-hashing "companies" go bye bye..

You'd think there is more profit in making little pod miners for the masses then massive rack units that require industrial grade power supply, yes?
and if anyone says "but the U3 didn't sell well" it had a major bug, that never got fixed, no one wanted to buy it.

look at the usb block eruptor, they are still selling! but nooo, lets make industrial grade miners and forget the little people, they can go "cloud" mine off someone.

so, tell me people, what will happen when the 3 major ASIC companies go bust when BTC drops price again?(begging  the question, i know) back to CPU/GPU mining for us.

am I the only one to be angry at this? that these ASIC companies listen to the ones with the big racks and cash?

enough of my ranting.

Firstly, Im not sure what you mean about 11,000 years to hash a block, or how a crash in BTC would magically make CPU/GPU>ASIC.

The USB block eruptor is a pathetic device (its cute and a teaching tool, but you wont make a profit) and theres virtually no sales of it for the last several months. It simply doesn't make sense to spend $450 / 1Terrahash when you could pay only $3,500 / 10Terrahash or even $30,000 / 100Terrahash. If someone is making a profit mining a small amount of bitcoins, it only makes sense they invest more money, buy the best hardware, and GO BIG. economics 101.

The smart layperson will buy shares/hashrate in a company they believe in (be it a manufacturer like BTCS, or contracts at a mining pool like westhash) if they wish to support bitcoin, or otherwise the bitcoin price must rise high enough that residential electricity rates can still turn a profit (while industrial miners make *even more* profit due to having the best hardware)

I would not be surprised if there were 50x as many customers of the SP20 as there were for the SP3x series, yet similar overall revenue due to the fact that many SP3x buyers were buying >$20,000 at a time


PS: I was watching the BTCS stock all day today, and it didn't even flinch from the news of the SP50. I thought it would jump up on the news that there is a new hashrate to sell and mine with?

[AJRGale]

Firstly, Im not sure what you mean about 11,000 years to hash a block, or how a crash in BTC would magically make CPU/GPU>ASIC.

for my 50GH/s mining capability going solo, the mean time between blocks. BTC go back to 50c/BTC, you think these companies(cloud mining/asic for btc) can support themselves? i think they will go of the ways as friedcat did. then what? no more asic been developed, then what? back to dark ages of gpu/cpu mining we go.

The USB block eruptor is a pathetic device (its cute and a teaching tool, but you wont make a profit) and theres virtually no sales of it for the last several months. It simply doesn't make sense to spend $450 / 1Terrahash when you could pay only $3,500 / 10Terrahash or even $30,000 / 100Terrahash. If someone is making a profit mining a small amount of bitcoins, it only makes sense they invest more money, buy the best hardware, and GO BIG. economics 101.

yep, since all home based mining capabilities can support these industrial units (power/cooling/noise), and they have a spare $30,000 in pocket to do that.

The smart layperson will buy shares/hashrate in a company they believe in (be it a manufacturer like BTCS, or contracts at a mining pool like westhash) if they wish to support bitcoin, or otherwise the bitcoin price must rise high enough that residential electricity rates can still turn a profit (while industrial miners make *even more* profit due to having the best hardware)

centralising bitcoin, perfect, company 1 has 40% total hash-rate company 2 has 30%, company 3 has the other 30%. who owns the votes of the network?
drop the difficulty by dropping the total hasrate from bigwigs, more availability for home miners, they can profit with costs now.

I would not be surprised if there were 50x as many customers of the SP20 as there were for the SP3x series, yet similar overall revenue due to the fact that many SP3x buyers were buying >$20,000 at a time

PS: I was watching the BTCS stock all day today, and it didn't even flinch from the news of the SP50. I thought it would jump up on the news that there is a new hashrate to sell and mine with?

yep, SP20s were not as profitable from the little people, as big corps buying up hundreds of these rack mountable sp30 hardware. but thats the problem, the little guys are missing out, bigwigs are profiting, and bitcoin network is getting more and more centralised and controlled by the bigwigs.