FPGA Information.

[bitcool]

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Obviously you've done case study on the resale value of second hand FPGAs, care to link me to it?

There.  one man's trash is another woman's treasure, or gold, or silver ....

[cablepair]

Nothing of signifcance can be done with FPGA's besides mine.

Quite false. FPGAs are not only for mining, they can be programmed to do (almost) anything you want them to do. Indeed, products such as what Ztex sells, and the Icarus board are designed primarily as development boards. Others such as X6500 and BFL are more suited to mining only, but the chip can do many other things once it has been reprogrammed.

BS. BFL and encrypted bitstream = not possible "for sure"

Also, unless they explicitly provide the special WPA cracking bitstream then they are useless.

I don't know how to make my own bitstream and I doubt many of us here do ...

BS to you. While we don't know for certain what chip is in BFL's product, that does not mean that all FPGAs are single purpose. Even if an encrypted bitstream is used, it is possible to flash the chip with a non encrypted one. The purpose of the encryption is to prevent others from copying the bitstream, NOT to prevent the chip from being used for other purposes.

plus its only a matter of time before someone is able to decrypt it and get the bitstream

I believe the same is possible to determine which chip they are using

if it can be done it can be undone.

the bottom line is if you believe in bitcoin for the long term FPGA is a great investment

if you do not believe in bitcoin for the long term you have no business even considering buying one


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if you want more information on FPGA including comparisons of all the known fpga miners and GPU as well check out http://wiki.btcfpga.com

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[dropt]

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Obviously you've done case study on the resale value of second hand FPGAs, care to link me to it?

There.  one man's trash is another woman's treasure, or gold, or silver ....

True for a masked ASIC, hardly for FPGA.

[lame.duck]

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Haha, old tech man, your 5series  GPU chips are old tech, they are never in production while spartan6 is the actual low cost xilinx line. If you study the fpga related discussion forums you will find that xilinx has a long time span between anouncing something and the first silicon you can get. So maybe you can get artix7 samples end 2012 ...

Your expectation of a 10% resale value could be good starting point for price discussion in case of. Of course we could negotiate a higher resale value (depends on FPGA-type, board type. time frame for the warrant etc ...). Of course not for free as there will be a lot of spartan6 boards for parts use will be on the market if the bitcoin goes belly up.

[silverbox]

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Haha, old tech man, your 5series  GPU chips are old tech, they are never in production while spartan6 is the actual low cost xilinx line. If you study the fpga related discussion forums you will find that xilinx has a long time span between anouncing something and the first silicon you can get. So maybe you can get artix7 samples end 2012 ...

Your expectation of a 10% resale value could be good starting point for price discussion in case of. Of course we could negotiate a higher resale value (depends on FPGA-type, board type. time frame for the warrant etc ...). Of course not for free as there will be a lot of spartan6 boards for parts use will be on the market if the bitcoin goes belly up.

Fine we can go with your 10% resale value number in lots of 100.  As far as I'm concerned thats nothing of significance.

If you want to argue that 10% resale value is significant, were just gonna have to agree to disagree

[lame.duck]

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Haha, old tech man, your 5series  GPU chips are old tech, they are never in production while spartan6 is the actual low cost xilinx line. If you study the fpga related discussion forums you will find that xilinx has a long time span between anouncing something and the first silicon you can get. So maybe you can get artix7 samples end 2012 ...

Your expectation of a 10% resale value could be good starting point for price discussion in case of. Of course we could negotiate a higher resale value (depends on FPGA-type, board type. time frame for the warrant etc ...). Of course not for free as there will be a lot of spartan6 boards for parts use will be on the market if the bitcoin goes belly up.

Fine we can go with your 10% resale value number in lots of 100.  As far as I'm concerned thats nothing of significance.

If you want to argue that 10% resale value is significant, were just gonna have to agree to disagree

What do you expect as a resale value for  a FPGA glued on a PCB which is some sort of nerd toy? The FPGA will have to be pulled and  reballed and have to compete against grey market devices. Plus the need for a $3600 design software. If you have the ztex-board with RAM on it or Icarus boards i would consider more, even more for these

http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1_65_185&products_id=1006
http://www.trenz-electronic.de/products/fpga-boards/trenz-electronic/te0630-spartan-6-series.html

as they seem well engineered and there are carrier boards avaiable which would have to be custom made (expensive) for the icarus boards.

The Terasic DE1 and DE2 boards sell for 50 to 80 % of the actual list price on ebay. Unfortunately the are not so well suited for Bitcoin mining

[antirack]

I agree in lots of 100 they may have some value, but the cost of reworking them, along with the fact that they are old tech, and newer better FPGA's are arriving will drive their price down to virtually nil.

Haha, old tech man, your 5series  GPU chips are old tech, they are never in production while spartan6 is the actual low cost xilinx line. If you study the fpga related discussion forums you will find that xilinx has a long time span between anouncing something and the first silicon you can get. So maybe you can get artix7 samples end 2012 ...

Your expectation of a 10% resale value could be good starting point for price discussion in case of. Of course we could negotiate a higher resale value (depends on FPGA-type, board type. time frame for the warrant etc ...). Of course not for free as there will be a lot of spartan6 boards for parts use will be on the market if the bitcoin goes belly up.

Fine we can go with your 10% resale value number in lots of 100.  As far as I'm concerned thats nothing of significance.

If you want to argue that 10% resale value is significant, were just gonna have to agree to disagree

What do you expect as a resale value for  a FPGA glued on a PCB which is some sort of nerd toy? The FPGA will have to be pulled and  reballed and have to compete against grey market devices. Plus the need for a $3600 design software. If you have the ztex-board with RAM on it or Icarus boards i would consider more, even more for these

http://shop.trenz-electronic.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=1_65_185&products_id=1006
http://www.trenz-electronic.de/products/fpga-boards/trenz-electronic/te0630-spartan-6-series.html

as they seem well engineered and there are carrier boards avaiable which would have to be custom made (expensive) for the icarus boards.

The Terasic DE1 and DE2 boards sell for 50 to 80 % of the actual list price on ebay. Unfortunately the are not so well suited for Bitcoin mining

Just out of curiosity, why do you have all these FPGA dev board makers (like Ztex and Trenz) in Germany and who are their customers outside of the Bitcoin world? I just can't imagine that they actually sold enough of these boards to make a living and pay taxes, company, etc... ? But then again, I know nothing about this market.

[lame.duck]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have all these FPGA dev board makers (like Ztex and Trenz) in Germany and who are their customers outside of the Bitcoin world? I just can't imagine that they actually sold enough of these boards to make a living and pay taxes, company, etc... ? But then again, I know nothing about this market.

Ztex and Trenz are just examples, since i live in germany i am a little biased and they produce boards with the largish XC6SLX150. There are a lot of other companies making FPGA-Boards. I think most of the boards are used for education, R&D. As the Trenz modules claim indutrial grade quality, there may be a small OEM market. As Trenz is a GmbH (similar to a Ltd) you can get some business numbers at bundesanzeiger.de.

[dropt]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have all these FPGA dev board makers (like Ztex and Trenz) in Germany and who are their customers outside of the Bitcoin world? I just can't imagine that they actually sold enough of these boards to make a living and pay taxes, company, etc... ? But then again, I know nothing about this market.

I get the feeling that a lot of people don't quite understand what FPGAs are exactly.  That aside, I'm thinking that the Ztex guy(s) don't do this as their primary source of income.  I'd hazard a guess to say that these guys are engineers who are doing this on the side (with the obvious exceptions).

[wogaut]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have all these FPGA dev board makers (like Ztex and Trenz) in Germany and who are their customers outside of the Bitcoin world? I just can't imagine that they actually sold enough of these boards to make a living and pay taxes, company, etc... ? But then again, I know nothing about this market.

I get the feeling that a lot of people don't quite understand what FPGAs are exactly.  That aside, I'm thinking that the Ztex guy(s) don't do this as their primary source of income.  I'd hazard a guess to say that these guys are engineers who are doing this on the side (with the obvious exceptions).

Yes, and I also think a lot of people that frequent message boards don't use search engines anymore  
GIYF "fpga applications"

Just from my own job: I'm in MRI Physics. Our MRI machines have numerous FPGAs in them each. Both for signal synthesis and processing. And I think GE is doing well enough with medical equipment? Our institution actually developed our own RF signal receiver and we used an FPGA that was originally designed for applications like radar. And the list goes on...

Because FPGAs were there before Bitcoin and because they are produced in sufficiently high numbers for industry applications, they are economically feasible for Bitcoin mining at this point at all. Not the other way round.

Edit: FPGA development boards by themselves would not be economically self-sustainable IMHO, they are there to develop a mass produced FPGA application. Bitcoin certainly gave the sales for those boards a boost.

[antirack]

I am glad you realized at the end that I was speaking about dev boards wogaut. It's exactly my point, I don't see how all these small scale operations can get by making only FPGA dev boards (without bitcoin), because there are already so many companies making dev boards...

[shad]

dev-boards are build to make everthing possible, so they are more expensive
mining-boards are made for mining, no digital/analog in/output, no display, no whatever

ztex sells fpga boards in all sizes, he did that before fpga-mining was here

[bulanula]

Just out of curiosity, why do you have all these FPGA dev board makers (like Ztex and Trenz) in Germany and who are their customers outside of the Bitcoin world? I just can't imagine that they actually sold enough of these boards to make a living and pay taxes, company, etc... ? But then again, I know nothing about this market.

I get the feeling that a lot of people don't quite understand what FPGAs are exactly.  That aside, I'm thinking that the Ztex guy(s) don't do this as their primary source of income.  I'd hazard a guess to say that these guys are engineers who are doing this on the side (with the obvious exceptions).

Yes, and I also think a lot of people that frequent message boards don't use search engines anymore  
GIYF "fpga applications"

Just from my own job: I'm in MRI Physics. Our MRI machines have numerous FPGAs in them each. Both for signal synthesis and processing. And I think GE is doing well enough with medical equipment? Our institution actually developed our own RF signal receiver and we used an FPGA that was originally designed for applications like radar. And the list goes on...

Because FPGAs were there before Bitcoin and because they are produced in sufficiently high numbers for industry applications, they are economically feasible for Bitcoin mining at this point at all. Not the other way round.

Edit: FPGA development boards by themselves would not be economically self-sustainable IMHO, they are there to develop a mass produced FPGA application. Bitcoin certainly gave the sales for those boards a boost.

I would really like to see a miner try and sell his used FPGAs for some medical unit.

The types of people that buy FPGAs are industrial / enterprise and I bet they would not ever buy some random mining board without enough I/O pins but would go to Altera / Xilinx direct for a custom FPGA solution since the market is not that big.

Good luck getting rid of the FPGA paperweights after the gold stream dries up !

They are REALLY hard to sell off since nobody but a few applications use them.

[wogaut]

@bulanula: Not some "medical unit". Biomedical research. And yes, people like me and colleagues use a lot of FPGA development boards. Generally medical research also has access to sufficient funds too. But of course as this being R&D, it is unlikely to have a chance for dumpling a few hundred of these things on an investigator team at once.
And they way funding is structured, it is indeed unlikely that university and medical research would buy them from a private miner.

And that option is mostly for development boards that are currently used as FPGA miners. As for the BFL FPGAs, these are really meant as encryption system, not development.

And crypto-currencies will not go away (even if Bitcoin fails). The "gold-stream" might dry up for those solely into it for profit, but there will be crypto-currency apps that I'm quite sure of. And as long as the FPGA can be reprogrammed, they will have work.

[cablepair]

If you do not believe in the future of Bitcoin you have no business buying a FPGA miner for $600, when in reality the resale value of the chip itself is maybe $100 per chip (if you are lucky)

the rest of the mining unit has no resell value what so ever.

The GOOD news is - Bitcoin WILL SUCCEED and these mining units are VALUABLE because Bitcoin mining will go on for at least another 6-8 Years+  and that is what is going to give these units real value - their energy efficiency in Bitcoin mining.

[wondermine]

Not to be too advertise-y but my FPGA mining solution doubles as a dev board or a ucLinux PC.

And nobody's going to decrypt an AES bitstream... who was it that said that...?

FPGAs are good and reusable, even already soldered in, that might even be helpful (depending on what pins are accessible and/or what it's hooked to on the board).

Making a bitstream ain't so hard if you learn an HDL and download some free software.

As for FPGAs being unusable because of their bitstream, that's bunk.  It's encrypted so you can't reverse engineer or steal it, but if you want to stick your own bitstream into the configuration PROM/FLASH/JTAG/USB-Blaster, you can go right ahead.

I warn you all I've been awake for 72 hours working on my thing, so if any information here is iffy, don't kill me for it...