Butterfly Labs - Bitforce Single and Mini Rig Box

[DeathAndTaxes]

One thing to consider is the overhead for queuing work and checking results: assume the serial communication goes over 115.2kbps 8N1, sending a job request takes around 4ms, if you added starting nonce and length about 5ms. Checking for results adds another ms.

At 800 MH/s the BitForce needs 5secs for the whole nonce range. Splitting up the work into e.g. 64 chunks to get latency down to 80ms will cost you about 350ms for communication. Thats 7% of total idle time for your BFL... Might still be worth considering as a mean to prevent chips from running hot

Good point but even with that limitation there has to be an optimal value.

Instead of 64 chunks say it processed 2^29 values per "chunk" making 8 chunks per nonce range and (assumming your math is correct) ~48ms idle time every 5 seconds or 1%.  If you prevent 1% less shares being lost then you are coming out ahead.  right?

There are other ways to improve miner-board communication (buffering next workload, having a "halt & return command" to force a smaller execution window, etc).  Without knowing the capabilities of the board it is hard to know what could be done.

Who knows maybe my interpretation of the docs is wrong.  Looking at luke code though it looks like he interpreted it the same way.


I don't know if giga or Inaba has p2pool setup but it would be interesting to compare normal non-merged mining pool (avg 600 sec LP interval), merged mining pool (~250 sec LP interval), and p2pool (~10 sec LP interval).

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[jamesg]

I have been watching this thread and want to thank everyone who has participated lately. It's great to see discussion about if/how to improve the BFL code and firmware without all of the BFL bashing going on.

Gigavps: any tips on how I can actually order their products bro? I placed an order four days ago , sent multiple emails and calls , I can't get anyone from bfl to even talk to me, I know they must be busy but damn ... Is it that hard for them to setup an order and take my money?

I don't know what to tell you. I have yet to meet the guys from BFL in person and placed my orders months before now.

I am sure they are swamped with all of the orders flying.

[Epoch]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

[cablepair]

Edit:

Just so you know BFL just emailed me, they apologized for the delay and said they are concentrating on getting orders out and will process mine this week , now I can be happy and stop bitchin !

Thanks sonny @ bfl !

[zefir]

One thing to consider is the overhead for queuing work and checking results: assume the serial communication goes over 115.2kbps 8N1, sending a job request takes around 4ms, if you added starting nonce and length about 5ms. Checking for results adds another ms.

At 800 MH/s the BitForce needs 5secs for the whole nonce range. Splitting up the work into e.g. 64 chunks to get latency down to 80ms will cost you about 350ms for communication. Thats 7% of total idle time for your BFL... Might still be worth considering as a mean to prevent chips from running hot

Unless the input/output is buffered before sent to the sha256 engine.
In that case it doesn't matter how often you send new work.

As folks said above: we need our BitForces to turn this speculation into a solid discussion. If BFL assumed that issuing a new work request while the engine is still busy invalidates current work, they might stop it as soon as they receive the 'ZDX' job request command.

Or they already knew about P2Pool and check for results supports incremental reporting and everything is fine. We'll see soon

[zefir]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

[Inspector 2211]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

[Energizer]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

Same here! it is almost 9 weeks now! and I've received NOTHING! I accept such delay as long as there would be an overall improvement to performance/cooling! But what is making me so angry is that Sonny started to ignore my emails 2 weeks ago. He used to answer my emails immediately in the first month but now it takes him at least 1 week to respond!

[simonk83]

I have been watching this thread and want to thank everyone who has participated lately. It's great to see discussion about if/how to improve the BFL code and firmware without all of the BFL bashing going on.

Agreed.   It's almost like a normal forum community in here!  (almost)

[simonk83]

 He used to answer my emails immediately in the first month but now it takes him at least 1 week to respond!

Obviously they're much, much busier now than they were in the "first month".   I don't know about you but I'd much rather they concentrate on getting everything finalised and posted out than answering 400 emails a day.

[zefir]

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

Same here! it is almost 9 weeks now! and I've received NOTHING! I accept such delay as long as there would be an overall improvement to performance/cooling! But what is making me so angry is that Sonny started to ignore my emails 2 weeks ago. He used to answer my emails immediately in the first month but now it takes him at least 1 week to respond!

Sounds reasonable to me, considering Inaba's and gigavps' reports were published like one week ago, causing a run at singles now. Bothering them with shipping dates is maybe counterproductive, but I see that 9 weeks is really way over the promised dates.

Nevertheless, I'm not yet worried for a) there are several confirmations that BFL is paying back payments on request and b) there are people willing to pay some premium to get pre-ordered devices with less delay.

[matthewh3]

I ordered one last Friday via PayPal and they still haven't got back to my email from Friday about shipping dates and import costs to the UK 

[uck]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

I placed my order November 16th, and have been told Next week a couple of times by Sonny.

[Epoch]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog.  

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

I placed my order November 16th, and have been told Next week a couple of times by Sonny.

That's 15 weeks since your order date and still (a) no shipment and (b) no confirmed date of expected shipment! Wow.  

[fred0]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog.  

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

I placed my order November 16th, and have been told Next week a couple of times by Sonny.

That's 15 weeks since your order date and still (a) no shipment and (b) no confirmed date of expected shipment! Wow.  

I agree. I'm not a fan of "real soon now."

[rjk]

My order was confirmed Nov 5th 2011. Am I worried? No. I am fairly sure I fit into the second production run, or the 1.5 production run, and probably not the first. I await an improved product, and so far no one else can touch the Mhash/$/W combination this offers. If I hack the input to take +12VDC from a PSU that has greater than 90% efficiency, I will be sitting pretty on my hash-in-a-box, for a decent power usage to boot.

[fred0]

My order was confirmed Nov 5th 2011. Am I worried? No. I am fairly sure I fit into the second production run, or the 1.5 production run, and probably not the first. I await an improved product, and so far no one else can touch the Mhash/$/W combination this offers. If I hack the input to take +12VDC from a PSU that has greater than 90% efficiency, I will be sitting pretty on my hash-in-a-box, for a decent power usage to boot.

Well, my impression is that Sonny is a conscientious guy and doesn't want a second rate QA.  So I am just trusting his judgement.  Hopefully, it is not misplaced. 

I actually ordered 2 units in October. And more in the beginning of November.  My last email said that 1 unit would be shipped to me last Friday.  So real soon now.

[kano]

One thing to consider is the overhead for queuing work and checking results: assume the serial communication goes over 115.2kbps 8N1, sending a job request takes around 4ms, if you added starting nonce and length about 5ms. Checking for results adds another ms.

At 800 MH/s the BitForce needs 5secs for the whole nonce range. Splitting up the work into e.g. 64 chunks to get latency down to 80ms will cost you about 350ms for communication. Thats 7% of total idle time for your BFL... Might still be worth considering as a mean to prevent chips from running hot

Unless the input/output is buffered before sent to the sha256 engine.
In that case it doesn't matter how often you send new work.

As folks said above: we need our BitForces to turn this speculation into a solid discussion. If BFL assumed that issuing a new work request while the engine is still busy invalidates current work, they might stop it as soon as they receive the 'ZDX' job request command.

Or they already knew about P2Pool and check for results supports incremental reporting and everything is fine. We'll see soon

Seems the answer is most likely: avoid p2pool for now until the next firmware version.
Assuming I understood the very short discussion I had with someone ...

1) The abort does not reply with anything already found
(my guess at understanding this is coz the abort is simply "start new work")

2) The results are returned at the end of processing the full nonce range.

So ... assuming a 820MH/s figure: nonce range takes: 5.24 seconds

So with an average 10 second LP without paid stales, that looks to me like you're gonna be throwing out a lot of work on p2pool.

[jddebug]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

November 16th. I ordered 10 singles.

[BFL-Engineer]

I got an email back from Sonny the other day. He's saying late this week for my singles.

I run Mac. Wondering if cgminer will compile for me and support the singles?

@jddebug, when did you place that order? I'm guessing November or December? Would give us an idea of how far along BFL is with their backlog. 

Not jddebug, but hopefully helping clarification: I placed my order end of January and received wire transfer information the same day. Payment from Europe took about one week and Sonny confirmed receipt immediately, giving me a projected delivery date mid of March.

I also requested updated API specification and received it the same day. That's why I never got impatient with them. OTOH, that were the times when 90% of forum members bashed BFL as scammers and the amount of orders might have been low.

I placed my order in early January and paid via Paypal, and as of today I have received: Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
In other words, this is now the 8th week [of waiting], seven weeks have passed.

Same here! it is almost 9 weeks now! and I've received NOTHING! I accept such delay as long as there would be an overall improvement to performance/cooling! But what is making me so angry is that Sonny started to ignore my emails 2 weeks ago. He used to answer my emails immediately in the first month but now it takes him at least 1 week to respond!

We apologize for any delays you have encountered. The reason behind our silence is that we're working to ship all units
as fast as we can. Delivery has already started, yet not all the people who ordered are participating in this forum.
As a result, out of many that are shipped, a few will post comments here in BitcoinTalk.org.


Regards,