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

[notlist3d]

...

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.

I think even a updated version of the SP30's might be nice for "hobby" miners.   I finally have the electricity and mining area where if they did a update version of something in the 30 series I would like to have it in my mining area depending on specifics.

So I will keep hope of it.   But I realize its a smaller priority then the SP50.

[Prelude]

AJRGale, why do you call the GPU mining days the dark ages? I think of them as the golden ages, where there was freedom to participate. All you had to do was drop a few hundred bucks on regular PC hardware of you were off to the races. No greedy corporations monopolizing bitcoin mining *cough transaction verification servers cough*.

All bitcoin is today is a race between China, Russia, Sweden, and Israel to dump as much BTC as the market will support to get FIAT before it crashes completely. Bring back the dark ages of GPUs IMO.

[johnyj]

Nice piece of hardware, but the needed power consumption is only for data center like buildings

[promojo]

What country are these shipping from?

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

You can almost bet Israel.  And shipping will be expensive.

[Searing]

I want to drop one of these in my basement, if anything just because I can.. My wife would get a kick out of that fan noise

note: jet engine fan noise 24/7 yeah you will be huge hit in the neighborhood .....

RIP profitable hobbyist mining on 120V circuits.

The ROI math using assumed pricing for these beasts doesn't even make them seem that profitable for large-scale mining.  I don't think any of the current gen hardware will ROI before the halving less than a year away.

It's an impressive machine, but coming on the heels of the S5+ and S7 I don't like the trend of "bigger bigger bigger" in both physical footprint and electricity demand.

I wonder where we'll be a year from now, 12.5 btc block rewards and 100 billion network diff...

It probably works just 'dandy' for the new spondoolies and btsc(is that it) merger......with their costs etc and such they can make 'quite the farm' if most of it goes to them
first...but again bitfury supposedly is gonna dump a data hall or two with their new chips so this could make asic difficulty madness to a whole new level

not to mention the fact that the 'western world' with high electric rates would be completely out of the picture we are talking iceland cooling and elec prices with a mess of these

so lets just run the difficulty of btc up 'all at once' and get it out of the way..move on to other aspects (kidding but quite the headlong rush in difficulty we will see)


NOTE: If it less then a FULL YEAR warranty this p50 is just a FAD and most of it for sure then will be for the data hall....90 days on this puppy would be BAD BAD BAD
if it decided to into full melt down 'space heater' mode
 

[Finksy]

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.

How would .50/BTC instantly make the millions of ASIC devices currently on the market less profitable than CPU/GPU mining?  Show me a CPU/GPU that is more efficient than even an Avalon1 or S1. If difficulty dropped enough to make CPU/GPU mining profitable again, it is only because the 440 PH/s of ASICs have been un-plugged *you guessed it* because they were no longer profitable.  Yes, if price continues to drop, we will see more manufacturers throwing in the towel.  But the 440 PH/s of hardware already exists, and won't evaporate over night.  If the difficulty drops far enough, someone will turn their machine back on, and a new equilibrium will be found REGARDLESS of what price Bitcoin is at.

The more mass adoption and confidence in bitcoin we get, the more it will be run like a regular enterprise, where margins get slashed down to minimal due to the free market and economic equlibrium, and only the people with the means to purchase in bulk and operate with lesser costs can make a go of it.  The reason we will never see the early days of every-day home miners turning a profit with CPU/GPU's is because companies have enough faith in the bitcoin economy to invest their capital in, and do so in the most cost-effective way that provides the largest returns.  With the developments today, that does not consist of farms of GPU's or U3's, but full-custom designed chips in large rack-mountable hardware.

There is a silver lining to all of this though, and that is that the days of rapid expansion of the network are long gone.  You may see the large players as centralization of mining power, but in some regards, because the network has become so large it is much less susceptible to any single emerging technology dominating the field. We have caught up to the technology of current processor manufacturers, and the efficiencies gained at each generation are both further between and smaller every time.

I honestly believe that we have reached a point where any further development in efficiency will be accompanied by natural growth of the price of bitcoin, at a slow sustainable speed. However, it will always be an arms race to get the newest, most efficient chip to market in order to get an advantage over your competition, and drive other manufacturers out of business.  Consider this, if the network difficulty would have remained flat over the past year, hardware like BFL and AMT would still be turning a profit, and they might still be in business.  Driving technology and difficulty is an effective tool for manufacturers to cull the herd. We may not like it as a community, but it's common sense from the business side of things.

[marvykkio]

I believe that it is almost to permanently delete the private miner, remain only the big companies, we will disappear private, BTC is becoming more centralized, the price will not go up, it is now one year that the price is low, you will not rise more, its maximum will always be from 200 to 300 $, you do not expect prices from $ 400 upwards, why it does not exist anymore

[dmwardjr]

I believe that it is almost to permanently delete the private miner, remain only the big companies, we will disappear private, BTC is becoming more centralized, the price will not go up, it is now one year that the price is low, you will not rise more, its maximum will always be from 200 to 300 $, you do not expect prices from $ 400 upwards, why it does not exist anymore

Sounds like a statement to add to the bitcoin obituary.  It indeed will go up again.  We are presently still riding along the bottom of a bowl [So to speak].  Really don't expect significant movement to a new bottom of $250'ish until after Thanksgiving.

[AJRGale]

Show me a CPU/GPU that is more efficient than even an Avalon1 or S1.

Derp!

But the 440 PH/s of hardware already exists

yes, but going by the lovely "help! my miner caught fire!!" threads or "Why doesn't my Miner work any more?!" threads every once and a while, guess what is going to disappear, especially when there is no one to make any more? just like Rockminer and their hardware, you think I could get my boxes replaced?

I thought the whole idea was bitcoin not to be centralised. I thought "every CPU (miner) has a vote on the blockchain"
Nah, its all there for corporations to make money and capitalise on the peasants to give them the transaction fees, just like the big banks do now

all im hoping for, is the day there is no more coins to mine, only transaction fees..
just like the end of the gold mining boom, there is still hobbyists mining, big corp or 2 making enough to pay for the mining, with government subsidies, and the guys with enough money to dig their own hole with licence to mine at that premises..

but anyway, why did I call the CPU/GPU mining times the dark ages not the golden age? I dunno, less known times then? the past? before I really got into it?

Still.. SPT better sell them smaller models for the rest of us, I'm happy to buy one of them blades in that case (since there is 10 of them in there, that would leave me with 11TH/s, hella better then my 50GH/s)

[Fatman3001]

Thanks.

(1)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).

(2)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.

(3)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.

(4)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...

Thanks for your reply


(1) My comments on the probable direction of price was mainly to show why I still consider mining an attractive proposition, as opposed to crude trading (holding). Which sort of leads to (2).

(2) At this point I look for the income bottom first. And the bottom is around 2-4x the price of the cheapest power with the most efficient equipment. This is the pain threshold. If return moves below this a lot of miners will drop off the grid and difficulty will drop. I look at how many machines I will need in order to weather the storm and be certain that I can pay electricity, rent for the facility, etc. and still have some money left. This is not for ROI, it's just to make sure I won't have to turn off the machines and lose the entire operation.

Only after this I start to look at likely movements in difficulty (Yes, we're going up, up, up now) and price in order to gauge the likelihood of ROI + profits. This part is speculation, but the only way around it is if you only count your investment in dollars and size it up so that you're assured ROI + profits, but then we're talking MW of power usage.

(3) I agree. I have more faith in Bitfury than KnC though. My guesstimate for KnC is closer to 0.2 J/GH. Their Solar "Soon" announcement one year in advance was definitely a scare tactic. But if dogie or philipma1957 ever got a hold a hold of one of KnCs or Bitfurys units I'd like to see what's what.

(4) I really appreciate your input here. A significant part of the equation is figuring out the likelihood of one of the producers dropping 2-4x more efficient gear in the middle of the aforementioned "storm". If you're on the wrong side of this one, and many have been, things can get tough.

[Medow]

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.

That is bad, it is forbidden here in our country to import goods from Israel.

[QuintLeo]

Not sure why Spondoolies announced the SP50 publicly, since they won't be selling it to the public. Kinda rude, actually, to tease us this way with UNAVAILABLE hardware.

Now, if they decided to sell a more affordable model based on the same chip, THAT would be worth announcing to the public.


 The BIG thing I look at this miner and wonder seriously about though is the cooling. Even if we assume that those 6x 120mm fans are the HIGHEST flow Deltas at around 250cfm, that's not a lot of airflow to keep 16 KILOWATTS WORTH OF HEAT GENERATION cool. That's ballpark 50K BTU, which is enough to heat most houses in any climate short of Siberia or Northern Canada / Northern Alaska (do note that most houses have a lot more furnace than they actually NEED).
 Good heatsink design can help a lot, but these units appear to have a similar problem to the SP20 - long boards, back part of the board getting already-warmed air flowing over it causing issues removing the heat. Those heatsinks they show better have a copper base plate, they're too short for a heatpipe design to help much if at all.

When the likes of TSMC step down their fabs to 20 nm or 16 nm

 TSMC has had 16nm for a while now, just very low yields as they work to improve the process. fab companies don't run "just one size", they commonly have multiple processes available at the same time, just running on different machines in different partsof their multiple fab facilities.



 I too would like to see Spondoolies make a smaller miner - single or 2 blade unit in a 2U shouldn't be hard at all for them to engineer, perhaps a 1U unit with a single blade at 10TH or so - though it looks like the blades might be too wide to fit in a standard rack-mount case horizontally. Perhaps a custom case?

A significant part of the equation is figuring out the likelihood of one of the producers dropping 2-4x more efficient gear in the middle of the aforementioned "storm".

 I'd call that "when will", not "the likelihood of".
 KnC I'm not worried about, even if their Solar has actually hit production I doubt it's going to make any big splash soon between yield issues and previous issues KnC has had with making RELIABLE chips (ref the MANY Titans with "dead die" issues).
 21 so far doesn't appear to be targeting serious mining at all, VERY iffy if they're going to become a serious factor.
 Bitfury, I'm guessing mid-to-late 2016 based on what they've already announced, will be hard to verify unless one of their "big corporate customers" speaks up (MBP perhaps?).
 Bitmain or Innosilicon, I'd guess late 2016 at the earliest and more likely mid-2017.

 Still at least one major unknown out there. What is Avalon doing?

[klondike_bar]

But the 440 PH/s of hardware already exists

yes, but going by the lovely "help! my miner caught fire!!" threads or "Why doesn't my Miner work any more?!" threads every once and a while, guess what is going to disappear, especially when there is no one to make any more? just like Rockminer and their hardware, you think I could get my boxes replaced?

I thought the whole idea was bitcoin not to be centralised. I thought "every CPU (miner) has a vote on the blockchain"
Nah, its all there for corporations to make money and capitalise on the peasants to give them the transaction fees, just like the big banks do now

all im hoping for, is the day there is no more coins to mine, only transaction fees..
just like the end of the gold mining boom, there is still hobbyists mining, big corp or 2 making enough to pay for the mining, with government subsidies, and the guys with enough money to dig their own hole with licence to mine at that premises..

but anyway, why did I call the CPU/GPU mining times the dark ages not the golden age? I dunno, less known times then? the past? before I really got into it?

Still.. SPT better sell them smaller models for the rest of us, I'm happy to buy one of them blades in that case (since there is 10 of them in there, that would leave me with 11TH/s, hella better then my 50GH/s)

only a small portion of miners (geneally the first generation or two) have any significant (>2%) failure rates. most of the bitmain/SPT gear is extremely reliable and could last for years still.

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources. If you pay $100/kw/month to mine at home, and someone else can get power+rent of a larger facility for $60/kw/month, its obvious which one will get squeezed out.

IMO, its crucial to understand that  'decentralized' means "no single person in control". Even with the trend to large datacenter farms, we are still looking at dozens of major pools (consisting small and big users), multiple manufacturers, hundreds of mining farms that draw >20kW. A few years ago everyone was worried that a bad person/gov could buy up $5,000,000 of hardware and conduct a 51% attack. That would now require ~$130,000,000 which clearly demonstrates a more secure network.

[Fatman3001]

But the 440 PH/s of hardware already exists

yes, but going by the lovely "help! my miner caught fire!!" threads or "Why doesn't my Miner work any more?!" threads every once and a while, guess what is going to disappear, especially when there is no one to make any more? just like Rockminer and their hardware, you think I could get my boxes replaced?

I thought the whole idea was bitcoin not to be centralised. I thought "every CPU (miner) has a vote on the blockchain"
Nah, its all there for corporations to make money and capitalise on the peasants to give them the transaction fees, just like the big banks do now

all im hoping for, is the day there is no more coins to mine, only transaction fees..
just like the end of the gold mining boom, there is still hobbyists mining, big corp or 2 making enough to pay for the mining, with government subsidies, and the guys with enough money to dig their own hole with licence to mine at that premises..

but anyway, why did I call the CPU/GPU mining times the dark ages not the golden age? I dunno, less known times then? the past? before I really got into it?

Still.. SPT better sell them smaller models for the rest of us, I'm happy to buy one of them blades in that case (since there is 10 of them in there, that would leave me with 11TH/s, hella better then my 50GH/s)

only a small portion of miners (geneally the first generation or two) have any significant (>2%) failure rates. most of the bitmain/SPT gear is extremely reliable and could last for years still.

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources. If you pay $100/kw/month to mine at home, and someone else can get power+rent of a larger facility for $60/kw/month, its obvious which one will get squeezed out.

IMO, its crucial to understand that  'decentralized' means "no single person in control". Even with the trend to large datacenter farms, we are still looking at dozens of major pools (consisting small and big users), multiple manufacturers, hundreds of mining farms that draw >20kW. A few years ago everyone was worried that a bad person/gov could buy up $5,000,000 of hardware and conduct a 51% attack. That would now require ~$130,000,000 which clearly demonstrates a more secure network.

+1


In fact, you'll need  "~$130,000,000" (Didn't check the figures, but sounds right) and access to (In the case of the SP50) 65MW draw of surplus power. The last one is more difficult than it sounds, and will turn the costs up significantly.

[fullzero]

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources.

Don't take this out of context.  That context being 'everyone is solo mining and pools do not exist.' 

Slush invented both the concept and the first mining pool long after this statement was made. 

Pools changed everything; Bitcoin may have remained an obscurity without them.

[Dr Charles]

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources.

Don't take this out of context.  That context being 'everyone is solo mining and pools do not exist.' 

Slush invented both the concept and the first mining pool long after this statement was made. 

Pools changed everything; Bitcoin may have remained an obscurity without them.

I agree entirely with you statement about Slush

[Fatman3001]

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources.

Don't take this out of context.  That context being 'everyone is solo mining and pools do not exist.' 

Slush invented both the concept and the first mining pool long after this statement was made. 

Pools changed everything; Bitcoin may have remained an obscurity without them.

Nope, there are plenty of pools to choose from. If you care enough t give a [delete expletive] you can still matter. Not everything has changed.

[fullzero]

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources.

Don't take this out of context.  That context being 'everyone is solo mining and pools do not exist.' 

Slush invented both the concept and the first mining pool long after this statement was made. 

Pools changed everything; Bitcoin may have remained an obscurity without them.

Nope, there are plenty of pools to choose from. If you care enough t give a [delete expletive] you can still matter. Not everything has changed.

Did you read my post?  Of course individual miners still matter; and the more pools hosted in different geographic regions the better.

Avoid using a pool if they have more than 12% of the Network.

[Fatman3001]

bitcoin was always going to centralise slightly. satoshi pointed that out at the very beginning and understood that in a short time mining and node operation would become limited to datacenters and geographic areas wit cheap resources.

Don't take this out of context.  That context being 'everyone is solo mining and pools do not exist.'  

Slush invented both the concept and the first mining pool long after this statement was made.  

Pools changed everything; Bitcoin may have remained an obscurity without them.

Nope, there are plenty of pools to choose from. If you care enough t give a [delete expletive] you can still matter. Not everything has changed.

Did you read my post?  Of course individual miners still matter; and the more pools hosted in different geographic regions the better.

Avoid using a pool if they have more than 12% of the Network.

Which post? The one where you said "[p]ools changed everything" as a way of negating klondike_bars statement? What am I missing?

[fullzero]

If you can't perform the thought experiment; it went over your head.