Change ASIC Chip of Hashboard to be profitabler

[BenjiAT11]

Hey, i need someone who is familiar with asic chips. I want to change the asic chips from an Antminer S9, what uses BM1387B Asic chip, the new Antminer S19 uses the chip BM1398BB, which is more power efficiency and faster, my question is, is it that easy to change the chips, has anyone tried this successfully?

Thanks to everyone

[dkbit98]

Hey, i need someone who is familiar with asic chips. I want to change the asic chips from an Antminer S9, what uses BM1387B Asic chip, the new Antminer S19 uses the chip BM1398BB, which is more power efficiency and faster, my question is, is it that easy to change the chips, has anyone tried this successfully?

It is not simple plug and play so you can't replace asic chips on your own if you don't know what you are doing or if you are not familiar with soldering and dealing with electronic equipment.
I did saw some youtube videos with people replacing asic chips, and maybe there are some local repair man who can do this for you, but you still need to order the chips and there are no guarantees your asic miner will work fine after this intervention.

[BenjiAT11]

Thanks for your answer, the soldering part is not the problem, i know how to solder such chips
The main problem i have is that there is no datasheet of the chips available, i only found one from bm1385, but i don't know if there is a difference between the 2 chips, maybe frequency or voltage can be different.

So maybe i find someone, who has already tried that before. 

[NotATether]

The main problem i have is that there is no datasheet of the chips available, i only found one from bm1385, but i don't know if there is a difference between the 2 chips, maybe frequency or voltage can be different.

Even without datasheets you can tell whether you'll be able to fit a BM1398BB chip inside an S9 hashboard by checking the fabrication processes for both miners.

If the processes are even slightly different then the chip won't fit all the way in and it's an impossible request. And in this case, the S9 chip is 16nm while the S19 chip is 7nm, so it's too small to fit in.

[HagssFIN]

Op, you presume that the pcb design has not changed at all and thus you could simply change chips.

The pcb design between S9 and S19 has changed a lot.
If you know about electronics, I'm sure you have noticed it.

Forget about this project.

[BitMaxz]

This is not going to work ASIC chip from s19 is different it has IC in the middle compared to the old ASIC from s9.
And they are totally different so you might experience some compatibility issue if you are going to replace the s9 ASIC chip with the s19 chip.

Unless if you can able to modify the whole program of the miner to use the s19 chip and modify the PIC program of each hashboard.

Much better follow what suggested by HagssFIN and you can save your time.

[mikeywith]

It is not simple plug and play so you can't replace asic chips on your own if you don't know what you are doing or if you are not familiar with soldering and dealing with electronic equipment.

This isn't a matter of soldering or any other factor that has to do with experience whatsoever, what he wants to do is not even remotely possible,  please don't give him false hopes.

the S9 chip is 16nm while the S19 chip is 7nm, so it's too small to fit in.

The obstacles are a lot greater than that, the nm term has nothing to do with the actual dimension of the final"chip", in fact, the S19 chip is 8mm*8mm, which so happen to be the exact same size as the S9 chip.


OP,  DON"T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, it will never work, not even the manufacturer itself will attempt such an experiment.

[wndsnb]

Not possible, pinouts of the chips have changed.  Don't have the pinout for the S19 chip, but since the S17 is different from the S9, I seriously doubt they went back to an old pinout. Also, they run at different voltages. So PSU won't work, control board won't work, and hashboards won't work.

I guess it would be technically possible to reverse-engineer a S19 hashboard, design a new PCB layout that would fit into a S9 case, buy new PSUs and control boards, hack the firmware to support a different # of chips since I'm sure you're not going to fit 114 chips on a S9 format .... all to be able to re-use a couple fans and a case ...lol. Good luck with that...

[NotATether]

the S9 chip is 16nm while the S19 chip is 7nm, so it's too small to fit in.

The obstacles are a lot greater than that, the nm term has nothing to do with the actual dimension of the final"chip", in fact, the S19 chip is 8mm*8mm, which so happen to be the exact same size as the S9 chip.

Good point (I think those are length x width dimensions, correct?) and also as noted there are a different number of chips that fit in both hashboards, so this is the kind of replacement that you have to do several times over.

I guess it would be technically possible to reverse-engineer a S19 hashboard, design a new PCB layout that would fit into a S9 case, buy new PSUs and control boards, hack the firmware to support a different # of chips since I'm sure you're not going to fit 114 chips on a S9 format .... all to be able to re-use a couple fans and a case ...lol. Good luck with that...

Nah, I don't think the boards can be reverse-engineered without breaking at least a couple of them while experimenting and bricking even more of them after that with unstable firmware.

[wndsnb]

Nah, I don't think the boards can be reverse-engineered without breaking at least a couple of them while experimenting and bricking even more of them after that with unstable firmware.

I think bricking a few boards would be the least of your worries .... that's only several thousand $... that's nothing compared to how much it would cost to design and layout a new PCB, and then even more for doing some firmware.

[kano]

Nah, I don't think the boards can be reverse-engineered without breaking at least a couple of them while experimenting and bricking even more of them after that with unstable firmware.

I think bricking a few boards would be the least of your worries .... that's only several thousand $... that's nothing compared to how much it would cost to design and layout a new PCB, and then even more for doing some firmware.

Firmware is cheap and easy to do, best to not believe what hackers say about the illegal ones they release to make people think it's ok to pay them a lot.

Hmm, I wonder what it would do to the Bitcoin price if it got out about how most mining is done with miners that violate a license.

[wndsnb]

Firmware is cheap and easy to do, best to not believe what hackers say about the illegal ones they release to make people think it's ok to pay them a lot.

Guess I didn't word that very clear... Didn't mean "even more than the PCB design", just additional. Might not be very difficult, but you think you can find someone to do it for under a few thousand $? I'm used to paying $150 an hour for good experienced software developer contractors.

If you filed a lawsuit against Bitmain, I wonder how much $ you'd need to be a big enough pain in their ass to motivate them to actually do anything. Probably not possible with the current USA administration, but cutting off all imports to the USA of miners violating the cgminer license would be a pretty powerful motivator. Do you know for sure that they are violating it? If they were smart, bmminer would have been developed as a completely different app not derived from cgminer at all.

[kano]

Do you know for sure that they are violating it?
...

The NSA helps with this

[mikeywith]

Hmm, I wonder what it would do to the Bitcoin price if it got out about how most mining is done with miners that violate a license.

There are currently about 7.9 billion people on planet earth, out of that massive number nobody cares about this except yourself, so the impact on price is as great/small as your own influence on the price of what now is a 1 trillion dollar market.

If you filed a lawsuit against Bitmain, I wonder how much $ you'd need to be a big enough pain in their ass to motivate them to actually do anything.

I believe only the owner of the copyright can do that, which I believe in this case is Jeff Garzik who wrote the Cpuminer which later Con Kolivas aka CK forked to Cgminer, neither Jeff Garzik nor CK seem to have an issue with how everyone is treating cgminer, they both simply don't care or/and know that there is no point going after a company in China or a few random individuals around the globe who don't provide the source code to their firmware.

The scale of the whole bitcoin mining industry is a drop in the ocean as far as the world is concerned, nobody is willing to waste their time on such subject, so in reality, nothing is going to happen/change, it's pretty sad, but it's what it is.

[kano]

...
I believe only the owner of the copyright can do that ... blah blah blah
...

Check again, there are a number of people - including myself - and even including people from bitmain and canaan ...