Official Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner (Last Update: April 14th, 2013)

[ArtForz]

Nope.
And the point still stands, your post history quite clearly shows that you are trying to scare away people from getting more GPUs.

[bulanula]

Nope.
And the point still stands, your post history quite clearly shows that you are trying to scare away people from getting more GPUs.

LOL haha what would the point of that be   

[Gameover]

They are planning custom mining card. Stop buying 5870s and wait for this around Q4 2011.

No proof / numbers / prices because its under NDA.

LMAO that is the dumbest thing I've read all day.  Yes ATI is going to focus their attention on a market that is less than 1% of the total graphics market.  By the time Q4 rolls around bitcoin will be expired.

[pwnyboy]

LMAO that is the dumbest thing I've read all day.  Yes ATI is going to focus their attention on a market that is less than 1% of the total graphics market.  By the time Q4 rolls around bitcoin will be expired.

He's a troll, pay him no mind.  Hopefully the mods will have terminated his account by the time Q4 2011 comes and goes, if not before.

[jlminer]

Nope.
And the point still stands, your post history quite clearly shows that you are trying to scare away people from getting more GPUs.

LOL haha what would the point of that be   

You should pay attention to what you post.  A few days ago you say that GPUs are going to way of the dinosaurs and you are glad you never invested in them.  Then a couple days later go on about how you put your 4 GPU cards up on ebay because they are going the way of dinosaurs.  SO which is it?

[bulanula]

Nope.
And the point still stands, your post history quite clearly shows that you are trying to scare away people from getting more GPUs.

LOL haha what would the point of that be   

You should pay attention to what you post.  A few days ago you say that GPUs are going to way of the dinosaurs and you are glad you never invested in them.  Then a couple days later go on about how you put your 4 GPU cards up on ebay because they are going the way of dinosaurs.  SO which is it?

Wow seems like some of the new Bitcoin demographic include children too.

I only bought 4 GPUs when I could have bothered and got 40 GPUs etc. That means I never bothered with GPUs because they are going the dino way.

Custom ASIC and FPGA will be the only way to stay profitable once difficulty hits 1 000 000 !

[Gameover]

false, there are plenty of work and home users (millions) who have ATI cards who get their power for free and could care less how much it costs.

[r2k-in-the-vortex]

i wouldnt reccommend buying fpga board if you only want to mine bitcoins but if you want to learn fpga development i guess you would already know what you want
also pretty decent programming skills and good understanding of electronics are a prequisite

You almost nailed it. I have the coding skills and I do a lot of embedded development, mostly with PICs but also H8 and the like. I never used FPGAs before and I've been waiting for an excuse for a long time now, so bitcoins might very well be it.

I have a pretty simple understanding of electronics, but I do have people So if I had to jump out of a dev board I could, and in fact would have all the expertise and industrial equipment available to me to do a full hardware implementation from scratch, but that obviously comes with an extra cost.

So, yeah, I *should* already know the answer to these questions if I had done my homework, but it's hard to keep up with everything and the bitcoin community has been the most helpful I've ever met... ever!

maybe focus on the price and secondary featureset of the board rather than cabability for fast bitcoin mining, you are not going to get rich quick with that anyway
i bought Basys2 from digilent, should be great starter kit for very good price if you are a univercity student, you might want to take a look around that site, they have lots of Xilinx dev boards, take a look into your wallet and decide what you can afford. most people say its more important to get cracking hands on with the hardware than to spends lots of time selecting THE board, you will probably buy some more capable board later on anyway

[Gameover]

seeing how expensive FPGAs are, and the huge limitations with paralleling them, they don't really seem to be a contender.  and doesn't designing and producing ASIC cost millions of dollars?  unless you are a engineer at an ASIC lab and have the tools and means at your disposal you are not going to go this route, why jeopardize your career on such a frivolous endeavor?

[r2k-in-the-vortex]

http://www.mosis.com/prices.html

heres a waffer pool, they gather lots of designs from all around and put them all on one wafer, it makes developing your chip a lot more affordable, to know how cheap you need to know how large your chip is going to be and what technology you plan on using then you can get a quote from them, eventual implementation in asic might be economically feasible in a year or so if the bitcoin economy grows at a current rate and trasaction fees start bringing money in. but first the technology must be optimized and verified on fpga before anyone will even seriously think of paying all that money for trying the design out on a asic

if bitcoin grows eventually asic implementation will be more efficient than using graphics cards and the first one to come up with an asic design for it will make some neat profit. i hope there will be an open source implementation but probably some corporation is going to cut in and steal that low hanging fruit if it becomes profitable enough, right now its far from profitable enough

[jlminer]

Nope.
And the point still stands, your post history quite clearly shows that you are trying to scare away people from getting more GPUs.

LOL haha what would the point of that be   

You should pay attention to what you post.  A few days ago you say that GPUs are going to way of the dinosaurs and you are glad you never invested in them.  Then a couple days later go on about how you put your 4 GPU cards up on ebay because they are going the way of dinosaurs.  SO which is it?

Wow seems like some of the new Bitcoin demographic include children too.

I only bought 4 GPUs when I could have bothered and got 40 GPUs etc. That means I never bothered with GPUs because they are going the dino way.

Custom ASIC and FPGA will be the only way to stay profitable once difficulty hits 1 000 000 !

Considering I am a 32 year old software developer, your comments are amusing.  I don't have a dog in the fight but when you are trying to argue with someone, you should at least try to be consistent.  You have contradicted yourself with your posts. So you were either lying with previous posts or you are lying now.  I don't really care because this is just a message board.  However, I think the evidence(your posts) are enough to tell people to take what you say with a grain of salt.

[Gameover]

http://www.mosis.com/prices.html

heres a waffer pool, they gather lots of designs from all around and put them all on one wafer, it makes developing your chip a lot more affordable, to know how cheap you need to know how large your chip is going to be and what technology you plan on using then you can get a quote from them, eventual implementation in asic might be economically feasible in a year or so if the bitcoin economy grows at a current rate and trasaction fees start bringing money in. but first the technology must be optimized and verified on fpga before anyone will even seriously think of paying all that money for trying the design out on a asic

if bitcoin grows eventually asic implementation will be more efficient than using graphics cards and the first one to come up with an asic design for it will make some neat profit. i hope there will be an open source implementation but probably some corporation is going to cut in and steal that low hanging fruit if it becomes profitable enough, right now its far from profitable enough

cool thanks for the info

[xf2_org]

Will ATI do a specific chip for miners?  That seems unlikely.

But I could definitely see a 'headless' opencl card from a board manufacturer like Sapphire, after Sapphire notices bitcoin miners are a significant market.

[fpgaminer]

http://www.mosis.com/prices.html

heres a waffer pool, they gather lots of designs from all around and put them all on one wafer, it makes developing your chip a lot more affordable

Very good info, thank you for pointing them out!

[smooth]

Will ATI do a specific chip for miners?  That seems unlikely.

But I could definitely see a 'headless' opencl card from a board manufacturer like Sapphire, after Sapphire notices bitcoin miners are a significant market.

It doesn't have to be bitcoin.  There are lots of GPGPU applications now, so headless cards definitely could make sense.

[vegaman]

Will ATI do a specific chip for miners?  That seems unlikely.

But I could definitely see a 'headless' opencl card from a board manufacturer like Sapphire, after Sapphire notices bitcoin miners are a significant market.

It doesn't have to be bitcoin.  There are lots of GPGPU applications now, so headless cards definitely could make sense.

Would also mean better airflow as they don't have to make room for the plugs and there's probably some things that could be removed from the board entirely, reducing the power usage and heat.

[LZ]

Good job, fpgaminer. Just donated 1 BTC.

[xyzzy]

Anyone port this over to a Xilinx chip yet?  I have a couple of different Xilinx-series boards I can borrow, but I'm too much of a verilog n00b to replace altpll and altsource_probe with vendor-neutral equivalents

[TheSeven]

Anyone port this over to a Xilinx chip yet?  I have a couple of different Xilinx-series boards I can borrow, but I'm too much of a verilog n00b to replace altpll and altsource_probe with vendor-neutral equivalents

I've just started working on a rewrite in VHDL for Xilinx FPGAs during the last hours.
While this is nowhere near finished, things look promising so far

[fpgaminer]

Good job, fpgaminer. Just donated 1 BTC.

Thank you lzsaver! That's really great 

Anyone port this over to a Xilinx chip yet?

I've got a branch of the project on my system that replaced the PLL and probes for Xilinx chips. ISE is giving me trouble though, and won't fully route the design. So it wasn't a one-night port like I had hoped  But I am working on it and will of course update the repo when the code is working.

I've mainly been tinkering with a WizNet module hooked up to the DE2-115 board, allowing the board to mine all on its own without a PC. 

There is also a great Pull request that was submitted a day or two ago. It allows the design to scale down to fit into smaller chips, which I know a lot of people have been waiting for. I'm just waiting for some free time to open up so I can dive in, test the new patch out, and merge it. Many thanks to udif for submitting such a wonderful improvement!