Diablo Mining Company will never buy Butterfly Labs hardware

[nedbert9]

I still think attacking a company based on speculation is a douche move.  Wait until they fail to deliver (again) exactly what they promise and then discuss.

Otherwise there are plenty of *** speculation threads here already.  

Now amazingly the thread isnt sticky and the *** trolls enterpoint thread is also no longer sticky.

Hope that was the other mods stepping in and curbing the misuse of moderator status.

It was clearly a troll move as the speculation about *** is already available in other threads AND his shareholders were already aware of his position (he alluded to this already)
SO the only reason was to incite some form of reaction, the very definition of trolling.

Any bold statement of disapproval is likely to illicit a reaction.  You can't categorically label this kind of speech as trolling without giving up the fair right of publicly expressing disapproval.

I think people here are defining trolling in an overly vague way that is out of context.

The only problem here is that he used a mod account (and sticky was a bad idea - but I haven't seen proof).  

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[wildemagic]

 You can't categorically label this kind of speech as trolling without giving up the fair right of publicly expressing disapproval.

Its categorical, the information he has already posted in his mining company thread, plenty of threads already contain speculation about ***.
There could be no other reason to post this thread and make it sticky other than by definition being a troll, then to be dishonest on top of it ....

Im not defending *** but I think for a mod to take this kind of action is a bit much.  Its not freedom of speech, its overuse of privileged mod status.
Hopefully, in the light of the threads being made non-sticky and no doubt other mods being informed, he learns from this err in judgment and is more appropriate in the future.

kind regards

[byte1]

Who is Diablo Mining Company ? And why should i care ? 

[crazyates]

Who is Diablo Mining Company ? And why should i care ? 

The OP wrote DiabloMiner, and also the Diablo kernel for CGMiner. DMC sells mining bonds.

[ice_chill]

Who is Diablo Mining Company ? And why should i care ? 

The OP wrote DiabloMiner, and also the Diablo kernel for CGMiner. DMC sells mining bonds.

I never knew it was him that wrote DiabloMiner, I respect that program very much as it gives the best GPU mining performance. He obviously has skills, he can maybe he can design own hardware ?

[seriouscoin]

I never knew it was him that wrote DiabloMiner, I respect that program very much as it gives the best GPU mining performance. He obviously has skills, maybe he can design own hardware ?

Since when a software programmer can design hardware?

Does Microsoft make best computers in the world?

[rjk]

I never knew it was him that wrote DiabloMiner, I respect that program very much as it gives the best GPU mining performance. He obviously has skills, maybe he can design own hardware ?

Since when a software programmer can design hardware?

Does Microsoft make best computers in the world?

Does Microsoft make the best software in the world?

I just had to, sorry.

[crazyates]

I never knew it was him that wrote DiabloMiner, I respect that program very much as it gives the best GPU mining performance. He obviously has skills, maybe he can design own hardware ?

Since when a software programmer can design hardware?

Does Microsoft make best computers in the world?

Does Microsoft make the best software in the world?

I just had to, sorry.

Once you get spoiled by a MBP, you automatically think software company = great hardware!

[bulanula]

A lot of people are questioning Butterfly Labs' commitment to the Bitcoin community, and a lot of people are even coming right out and calling it a scam or a long con or the end of Bitcoin.

I cannot help but agree with these people.

Without a second vendor producing hardware just as efficient and cheap as Butterfly Labs claims their new Bitforce SC hardware is, I do not believe Butterfly Labs is being completely honest with potential customers.

Because of how Butterfly Labs has handled customer relations, Diablo Mining Company will never purchase Butterfly Labs hardware. We will pursue high-efficiency FPGA and ASIC hardware from alternate vendors only.

Diablo Mining Company will be the largest Bitcoin startup in the world, and we will do it without the help of Butterfly Labs.

Diablo Mining Company main thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77469.0
Diablo Mining Company on the Global Bitcoin Stock Exchange (GLBSE): https://glbse.com/asset/view/DMC

No trolling here. I respect this guy for what he stands for in the first place.

Forget about BFL and their "venture capitalists" and their 0% interest free loans that are totally unsecured.

What happens if the ASIC has a problem ? All BFL sheep lose their money ( I would so LOVE to see that and all the FPGA guys get back on track ).

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Hats off to you DiabloD3 !

At least he has the integrity to stand up and not fall for this BFL greed craze / speculation and their long con ...

Too bad not a lot of people / bond sellers are that honest.

And he has not abused any mod powers because I never saw any sticky on this subforum today.

Please stop trolling ... what do you have against DiabloD3 and why do all of you seem to love the BFL god so much

Seems that the money promised by BFL has corrupted most of the miners here. Will be a landfall when they fail to deliver, yet again. I will laugh my socks off !

[iidx]

While performance could come close, Virtex 7 2000 can never compete with the price of BFL's ASIC, and at the end of the day, the main concern is how quickly can you pay off for the hardware.

And lets not mention power consumption. 'per chip' is an utterly meaningless metric, particularly when per GH costs and power efficiency of asics can be two orders of magnitude higher for any given process.

Anyway, there is no point trying to talk sense in to D3D.

BFL has not stated the power consumption of their SC minirigs, and their chips might be 130 or 90mm fab, while Virtex 7 is 28nm.

Even if Virtex 7s or Kintex 7s cost 3x more per mhash to what BFL claims theirs do, so what? At least the vendors of existing Spartan 6 products actually have shown to be committed to their relationship with the Bitcoin community, and these will be most likely the ones that are making Kintex/Virtex 7 products.

I have no idea how much they cost, but judging by the real cost of BFL's FPGAs in the MiniRig, and the fact that 28nm is very new so will be very expensive with no 2nd hand market, I would estimate at best you are looking at $1500 for 5GH Virtex7 vs $300 for 7GH with 2 ASIC coffee warmers.

Most likely BFL will miss the October date.

Lets say the Virtex 7 is 13x more usable slices and can be clocked 2x what Spartan 6s are stable at, thats around 7.2ghash. I think someone on the forums said they'd cost about $1000 each, so we're looking at, say, a $1200 product price. Thats only 4x more expensive per mh.

Rolling this as a SASIC could drop the price even more and also increase the stable clock speed 3-4x over Spartan 6s, or 10.8 - 14.4 ghash for, say, a $1000 product. Thats in the same ballpark as what BFL is claiming.

Woah, there's NO way the V7-2000 part will cost $1000.  As you may know, the price of the chips really depends on the so called "relationship" between Xilinx and your company.  The company must negotiate a discount based on its sized, volume and other "factors".

I work for a large company that is a huge user of Xilinx FPGAs (ranging in size small devices to large devices).  We're currently using Kintex 7 devices on a few projects.  For example, the production device cost of a Kintex 7 480 device for us is about $900 in quantities of at least 1000 per year.  This price goes down as the device gets older.  The price to a small time company will probably be higher because their overall volume of all devices combined will be much lower.

However, based on this pricing Xilinx has shown us for the Virtex 7 devices, I would expect the low volume price of the V7 2000 device (their largest ever) to be at least $10,000 in low volume.  The low volume price for the largest V6 device right now is over 12k.  I'd guess once the V7-2000T finally goes in to production, even if you could get the deep discounts, you'd probably have to pay 3-5k each.

The other problem is that the bigger the devices get, the harder it is to get a good yield.  The huge V7 2000 is 2 to 4 (I forget the exact number) separate devices glued together.  The yields can prevent this chips from being produced in high volume, so supply can also be an issue in addition to price.  Usually these chips go to the biggest customers first, since they are the most important accounts.

I believe that the best we can hope for from FPGAs is to find the sweet spot in price/performance and use multiple devices.  This is how all the FPGA mining products are setup today.  I believe that the price/performance ratio won't get much better than what is available from the FPGA mining solutions today.

The Xilinx hardcopy equivalent, easypath, costs $300k in upfront costs right off the bat for a %35 cost reduction over your current FPGA pricing...  So even this path can be difficult.

[Coinoisseur]

What do you think that Kintex 7 480 would do Mh/s and Mh/W? Any insight into Artix 7s? They are supposed to slot into the Spartan 6 space once available in good volume.

[iidx]

What do you think that Kintex 7 480 would do Mh/s and Mh/W? Any insight into Artix 7s? They are supposed to slot into the Spartan 6 space once available in good volume.

I haven't tried mining on the 480s, only on V6 240s.  The reason behind this is I have a handful of unused boards that have V6s on them, while the K7 boards are all used for my real work.

I made an entry in the mining hardware comparison long ago:

The V6 240s run at 375 MH/s at about 16w.  This isn't optimized (other than to use some DSP48s), so I guess you could probably squeeze another 50-100 MH/s out of the devices with some effort.

The MH/s based on the size of the device breaks down as follows:

375MH/s / 240 = 1.5625 MH/s per "size unit"

Based on this, I would estimate the 480 could do:

480 * 1.5625 = 750 MH/s

I haven't used Xilinx's power estimator for a K7 bitcoin design, but Xilinx claims 50% less power than the V6.

So, you could assume your worst case would be 32w, best case 16w.  Somewhere in the middle will probably be your actual power.

BUT!!  You may think the Kintex 7 would be better for mining (price/performance) than a Spartan or Artix device, but you'd be wrong!

Take the Mod miner for example:

840 MH/s @ 40w in 4 x Spartan 150 devices

840 MH/s / (4 * 150) = 1.4 MH/s per "size unit"

So, the S6 is a little less efficient in terms of size/performance (partly because I used DSP48s in the V6 example to reduce logic usage, but there are other factors), but the price difference is huge.  I think the S6 LX150 is ~$100, so there's no real good reason to buy the K7 or V6.  The K7 and V6 provide more advanced functionality (high speed serial, more internal memory, more DSP slices, more pins, etc) that aren't required for bitcoin mining.  You'd end up paying for features you don't use.

Once the Artix devices come out in force, I suspect they will be similar in price/performance to the S6.  Power consumption will be somewhere between 50% less and the same as the S6.  However, they are the last devices to go into production (after the K7 and V7).

[Xian01]

Diablo, dude, I love your mining software, I use it, but man you come off as sour-grapes with this post, and being overly melodramatic given the fact you are a moderator of these forums.

What's the going rate for 0.5mg of Xanax on SR ? I might suggest placing an order for one and calm down.

EDIT: Shit dude, I will GIVE you the BTC for 0.5mg of Xanax to calm down. Please don't flake out on us.

[RoloTonyBrownTown]

Now your lying about it being stickied in the first place?  Sheesh dude.

Now your justifying your position with more speculation about the state of the industry to justify your stance against ***'s speculation?

Lastly, you have accused others of trolling threads when it was mere discussion, now your clearly abusing your mod status and actually trolling.

Bad form.

This forum is such a mess.   

[DiabloD3]

4 times can mean the difference between 1 year to pay off, and 4 years to pay off, so still quite a gap in my opinion.

---
Or even with half price FPGA resale value, still 2 years to pay off before profit comes rolling in, assuming power consumption can match the ASIC.

BFL still refuses to quote power usage figures, and they're probably in the realm of 28nm or SASIC anyhow.

[DiabloD3]

I still think attacking a company based on speculation is a douche move.  Wait until they fail to deliver (again) exactly what they promise and then discuss.

Otherwise there are plenty of *** speculation threads here already. 

Now amazingly the thread isnt sticky and the *** trolls enterpoint thread is also no longer sticky.

Hope that was the other mods stepping in and curbing the misuse of moderator status.

It was clearly a troll move as the speculation about *** is already available in other threads AND his shareholders were already aware of his position (he alluded to this already)
SO the only reason was to incite some form of reaction, the very definition of trolling.

Except there is no speculation here. DMC will not buy BFL hardware. I do not care if they deliver exactly what they promised, they already burned that bridge. This is purely based on their current and past actions, and has nothing to do with what they will or will not deliver.

[DiabloD3]

Can we get this moved here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=81.0

Or somewhere else besides the hardware forum?

This is not a speculation thread. DMC's ban on BFL hardware is based on what they have already done, not what they will do.

[DiabloD3]

What do you think that Kintex 7 480 would do Mh/s and Mh/W? Any insight into Artix 7s? They are supposed to slot into the Spartan 6 space once available in good volume.

I haven't tried mining on the 480s, only on V6 240s.  The reason behind this is I have a handful of unused boards that have V6s on them, while the K7 boards are all used for my real work.

I made an entry in the mining hardware comparison long ago:

The V6 240s run at 375 MH/s at about 16w.  This isn't optimized (other than to use some DSP48s), so I guess you could probably squeeze another 50-100 MH/s out of the devices with some effort.

The MH/s based on the size of the device breaks down as follows:

375MH/s / 240 = 1.5625 MH/s per "size unit"

Based on this, I would estimate the 480 could do:

480 * 1.5625 = 750 MH/s

I haven't used Xilinx's power estimator for a K7 bitcoin design, but Xilinx claims 50% less power than the V6.

So, you could assume your worst case would be 32w, best case 16w.  Somewhere in the middle will probably be your actual power.

BUT!!  You may think the Kintex 7 would be better for mining (price/performance) than a Spartan or Artix device, but you'd be wrong!

Take the Mod miner for example:

840 MH/s @ 40w in 4 x Spartan 150 devices

840 MH/s / (4 * 150) = 1.4 MH/s per "size unit"

So, the S6 is a little less efficient in terms of size/performance (partly because I used DSP48s in the V6 example to reduce logic usage, but there are other factors), but the price difference is huge.  I think the S6 LX150 is ~$100, so there's no real good reason to buy the K7 or V6.  The K7 and V6 provide more advanced functionality (high speed serial, more internal memory, more DSP slices, more pins, etc) that aren't required for bitcoin mining.  You'd end up paying for features you don't use.

Once the Artix devices come out in force, I suspect they will be similar in price/performance to the S6.  Power consumption will be somewhere between 50% less and the same as the S6.  However, they are the last devices to go into production (after the K7 and V7).

Okay, so, the forum had V7 and K7 pricing a magnitude wrong (thanks guys), so what is the cheapest way of getting SASICS? Power usage isn't an issue if we go 65 or 90nm, and BFL is going 90 or 130nm on "real" ASIC (which has yet to be proven).

I think the ideal device would be an FPGA that it just all slices, no DSP slices, no high speed serial, no large gobs of memory, etc, and on top of that offers SASIC migration.

Does any company offer that, no matter the node size?

[imsaguy]

d3 wants to be trusted with money... i would rather trust bfl, and i would rather fuck myself with a cactus than trust bfl...

That can be tough to reach and get any leverage.  You may need some help with that.  I have just the thing.



But yes, donating to the neo-nazi youth is worse than giving to bfl or asking me to help you cram a cactus in your daddy pleaser.

Quoted because reeses is a pussy that deletes his posts.

[iidx]

What do you think that Kintex 7 480 would do Mh/s and Mh/W? Any insight into Artix 7s? They are supposed to slot into the Spartan 6 space once available in good volume.

I haven't tried mining on the 480s, only on V6 240s.  The reason behind this is I have a handful of unused boards that have V6s on them, while the K7 boards are all used for my real work.

I made an entry in the mining hardware comparison long ago:

The V6 240s run at 375 MH/s at about 16w.  This isn't optimized (other than to use some DSP48s), so I guess you could probably squeeze another 50-100 MH/s out of the devices with some effort.

The MH/s based on the size of the device breaks down as follows:

375MH/s / 240 = 1.5625 MH/s per "size unit"

Based on this, I would estimate the 480 could do:

480 * 1.5625 = 750 MH/s

I haven't used Xilinx's power estimator for a K7 bitcoin design, but Xilinx claims 50% less power than the V6.

So, you could assume your worst case would be 32w, best case 16w.  Somewhere in the middle will probably be your actual power.

BUT!!  You may think the Kintex 7 would be better for mining (price/performance) than a Spartan or Artix device, but you'd be wrong!

Take the Mod miner for example:

840 MH/s @ 40w in 4 x Spartan 150 devices

840 MH/s / (4 * 150) = 1.4 MH/s per "size unit"

So, the S6 is a little less efficient in terms of size/performance (partly because I used DSP48s in the V6 example to reduce logic usage, but there are other factors), but the price difference is huge.  I think the S6 LX150 is ~$100, so there's no real good reason to buy the K7 or V6.  The K7 and V6 provide more advanced functionality (high speed serial, more internal memory, more DSP slices, more pins, etc) that aren't required for bitcoin mining.  You'd end up paying for features you don't use.

Once the Artix devices come out in force, I suspect they will be similar in price/performance to the S6.  Power consumption will be somewhere between 50% less and the same as the S6.  However, they are the last devices to go into production (after the K7 and V7).

Okay, so, the forum had V7 and K7 pricing a magnitude wrong (thanks guys), so what is the cheapest way of getting SASICS? Power usage isn't an issue if we go 65 or 90nm, and BFL is going 90 or 130nm on "real" ASIC (which has yet to be proven).

I think the ideal device would be an FPGA that it just all slices, no DSP slices, no high speed serial, no large gobs of memory, etc, and on top of that offers SASIC migration.

Does any company offer that, no matter the node size?

I am not that familiar with Structred ASICs (SASICs).  I'm mostly a Xilinx person, and they offer "Easypath" devices which aren't Structured ASICs.  They are more or less FPGAs that only load one bitstream.  Xilinx only promises a 35% cost reduction and requires a 300K upfront fee.  I don't believe Easy path devices are offered for the Spartan 6 family because the cost is already pretty low.

Altera offers actual structured ASICs for many families, so the price per unit can be reasonable for a larger device.  However, since it's an actual custom ASIC, the setup/up front fee is probably pretty large.  In addition, you have to budget time and money for "oops" mistakes which would require a second or even third turn of the ASIC.

Anyway, to answer your question, Altera offers 4 different structured ASIC options.  Two of the options offer the stuff you would use for mining (mostly logic, not features we wouldn't use) without extra fluff.  They also offer sizes that range from small to large within the different families.

I do not have any pricing information on this scheme because I've never gone down this path as part of my Job.  I still think the cost is non trivial since you're actually making a custom device.

There are other vendors you can work with that will help you convert create and ASIC or Structured ASIC, but Altera offers an end to end solution for SASICs.  That probably makes them a good choice since you only deal with one vendor.  However, I have never dealt with that type of design flow before, so I have no first hand experience.

In the end, it's all about up front money.  Upfront money for manufacturing a PCB (not too bad), and upfront money to create an ASIC or SASIC.  I am curious as to what route (ASIC/SASIC) BFL went for their "upcoming" products and what the upfront costs were...  Time to market for any of these options is pretty long, so they had to have started a while ago.