[ANN] Sfards:SF100, the first 28nm Dual-Mode Miner is accepting pre-order now

[Rabinovitch]

S6 was skipped / replaced by S4+, next is S7.

Any details about what it will look like? Specs?

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[dogie]

S6 was skipped / replaced by S4+, next is S7.

Any details about what it will look like? Specs?

No, its up to them to release details (which I also don't know). Sorry for the OT, I just wanted to clear up the "where is the S6" question = you had it, but it was called the S4+.

[BeerPimp]

It will be interesting to see pricing.  But they will be able to charge a premium since there just isn't anyone producing miners.  Hashro Astro looks like a bust unless I have missed any recent news.

[philipma1957]

It will be interesting to see pricing.  But they will be able to charge a premium since there just isn't anyone producing miners.  Hashro Astro looks like a bust unless I have missed any recent news.

They won't get the buyers, everyone is expecting the S7 anytime and at it's current rate it won't move units. They are probably just going to self mine til they want to sell them at 400$ a unit.

or go avalon 4.1 method of high price and hope people buy for a unique feature:

 avalon 4.1 was really quiet
 sfards will dual mine


avalon sold  out all its gear slow but sure.

so if sfards mines at a profit and slowly sells at a high price they will profit.

[quakefiend420]

I wonder if it will be possible to tune Scrypt and SHA256 separately?  I'm guessing that it's just based on the frequency of the whole chip, so probably not, but it would be neat if we could crank up the hashrate on the Scrypt side while keeping SHA256 side more power efficient if Scrypt were to be paying better...

I've never even tried to dual mine with my original five chip gridseed, so this is hearsay at best, but it was my understanding that the two modes are completely separate and can be tuned as such. Can anyone confirm or clarify this? (tempted to try)

I have a bit of experience dual mining with Greedseeds 5 chip product. Each side can be "tuned" individually but they do NOT work reliably in "dual" mode. Miners will slowly start dying over time requiring a power cycle to get them going again. Since I mine in a remote datacenter without the ability to easily power cycle equipment I resulted to only using the scrypt side. On scrypt they are very stable running for months without fail. I have had mine running non-stop since they first came out.

Having just read the first 40 pages of this thread I am reminded of what Gridseed did with the release of their 5 chip product. They will absolutely try to maximize profits. Expect these new miners to initially be priced at a premium. There will be a limited number available and people will buy them. Once they ramp up production pricing will start to come down quickly.

The original 5 chip Gridseed was brought to market at around $300 and quickly declined from there. I am not at all surprised at the $1,129 price being discussed here. If they do not sell enough of their initial limited quantity it is very easy for them to adjust down.

It would be interesting to try and determine their cost including development and production to get an idea how low they can go before it stops making sense to produce them.

Edit: These would have to be priced at $183.41 for them to compete with the $999 ALCHEMIST 256 Mh/s miner since power cost is not a concern for me...strictly thinking about scrypt of course.  

Thanks for sharing your experience with them.  As I have no experience with them.  I will probably give them a try with group buy for 2 to 4 rigs if they will approve a group buy for someone in the US.  My intent is still to have a mining operation in Washington State.  Was planning on the 4th Quarter of this year of 1st Quarter of 2016.  Now it's looking like 1st or 2nd Quarter of 2016.  Who knows, I may end up with most of my equipment being SFards.

Thanks again for sharing.

well for scrypt the blades were good gear.  starting price was 3k and they dropped to 500usd pretty fast.

plus the blades sucked so bad at 256 mining no one every did  mine them that way.

If this gear is like that people will not be happy. and no one has seen them mine 256. or scrypt in a you tube video.  be careful don't be quick.

or jump in and get a deal.  No one knows.

I tell you if J4obberwocky gets his development kit running maybe he will let us know what the chips can do.

@J4obberwocky any luck with the board?

Well, the blades would blow up if you tried to dual mine, they didn't have enough power circuitry.  The 5 chips and the stickminers were the only ones that were capable without releasing their magic blue smoke.

[J4bberwock]

Almost there:

[TheRealSteve]

Spotted the troublesome SOT   Those toggle switches *clack* *clack* aw yeah.  Nice to see progress updates, keeping fingers crossed for you

[philipma1957]

Almost there:

I spelled your forum name wrong sorry about that. and second that board looks really nice.

I can feel be flipping those toggles.

can't wait to see it mining.

[Finksy]

Hey J4bber, you forgot to include the Overclock switch:



Lol

[valkir]

Wow great job J4bber!

Any specs about it? 

[philipma1957]

Hey J4bber, you forgot to include the Overclock switch:



Lol

Thanks I got to smile for a while.

[akashamar]

Sfards, you said that miners will be available for purchase in July ... we're almost there ... any new exact date? And what quantities will be available?

Also, I'm curious, since you'll be using dual mode, which software will you use, cgminer or bfgminer?

[J4bberwock]

Almost there:

Looks good, does it use the same communication as gridseeds? Pretty much want to know if new software would be needed or a pi with minera would be ready to go with this?

the current software can be found here:
https://github.com/sfards/ASIC-SF3301/tree/master/miner_code

But there will probably be implementations in CGminer and/or bfgminer as soon as the hardware is shipping.

[J4bberwock]

Hey J4bber, you forgot to include the Overclock switch:



Lol

No, it's software activated:

[J4bberwock]

Almost there:

Looks good, does it use the same communication as gridseeds? Pretty much want to know if new software would be needed or a pi with minera would be ready to go with this?

the current software can be found here:
https://github.com/sfards/ASIC-SF3301/tree/master/miner_code

But there will probably be implementations in CGminer and/or bfgminer as soon as the hardware is shipping.

Sounds good, what quantity of these do you plan on making if you do even plan on making a batch? I really like the design and well not the price of sfards main product.

This is just a dev board, it's not economically viable as a miner. Even with a chip price way lower than the 100$ for one sample.
I'll have a look at my BOM, but without the chips, I'm probably already over 150$ for one board.

[akashamar]

Almost there:

Looks good, does it use the same communication as gridseeds? Pretty much want to know if new software would be needed or a pi with minera would be ready to go with this?

the current software can be found here:
https://github.com/sfards/ASIC-SF3301/tree/master/miner_code

But there will probably be implementations in CGminer and/or bfgminer as soon as the hardware is shipping.

Huh, hopefully they will implement driver into cgminer and bfgminer as soon as possible since the original minerd is a rather ancient piece of software ...

[CartmanSPC]

Example:

BTC:
sudo ./minerd -a sha256d -o stratum+tcp://POOL_URL -u USER -p PASSWORD -d /dev/ttyUSBx -f 600

LTC
sudo ./minerd -o stratum+tcp://POOL_URL -u USER -p PASSWORD -d /dev/ttyUSBx -f 600

So just like the original gridseeds you will be running two separate instances of the mining software (one for BTC and one for LTC). Each can be tuned individually. Like J4bberwock said; it shouldn't be long before someone adds support to cgminer.

No one ever managed (AFAIK) to get separate instances of cgminer to run both BTC and LTC at the same time with the original gridseeds. You could only run cgminer for BTC and then had to run cpuminer for LTC when dual mining. Trying to run cgminer with gridseed scrypt support at the same time as cgminer with gridseed sha256 support would not work. The second instance of cgminer would see the port as already in use (I think...it's been a while).

One instance of cgminer utilizing both SHA256 and scrypt would be ideal but something tells me we wont see that unless Sfards changed the way the miners are accessed. There was some talk of it being worked on by third parties (with the original gridseeds) but nothing came of it.

Huh, hopefully they will implement driver into cgminer and bfgminer as soon as possible since the original minerd is a rather ancient piece of software ...

I wouldn't count on it. They will most likely only release what is already available and count on others to fill in the gaps like they did with the original gridseeds.

[toptek]

Almost there:

so all this is in that case is a updated version of the first Gridseed , wonder if we can upgrade the Gridseed g- black with this all we would need is boards that fit those Heat sinks ). if it Plugs in the same way
etc .or some one fits boards for those heat sinks etc..


That boards looks about the same size as the Gridseed g- black boards, i know that's just a test board.but it looks so sweet i want a full miner.

[J4bberwock]

Almost there:

so all this is in that case is a updated version of the first Gridseed , wonder if we can upgrade the Gridseed g- black with this all we would need is boards that fit those Heat sinks ). if it Plugs in the same way
etc .or some one fits boards for those heat sinks etc..


That boards looks about the same size as the Gridseed g- black boards, i know that's just a test board.

I don't know for the G black (still haven't got one in hands), but the heatsinks on the G blade are designed to dissipate something like 200 watts.
From what I can remember, my first fully overclocked G-Blade was drawing 350-400w.

With SF3301, 200 watts would be 5-6 chips hashing at a total of 400-500GH SHA, and 10-16MH scrypt on each PCB.
The number of chips on board is probably not high enough to make it economically interesting for the end user, but it can be done.

My dev board is 150x100mm

[-droid-]

This is getting interesting, cant wait to see more specs and price