ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[Ytterbium]

Depends what "do the job well" means.

These guys are going straight for 28nm.

good for them. However friedcat obviously has much more experience with creating chips and devices for bitcoin mining. I would sooner trust Avalon or Asicminer to create new chip before KnCMiner and Cointerra and Hashfast since they have never created bitcoin mining ASIC chip before.

Well, that's ridiculous.  Designing a bitcoin ASIC is easy.  You could do the basic logic layout in an afternoon. The future is figuring out how to make it more space and energy efficient.

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[Rival]

These products would sell out if you encased them in a pile of dog shit. So for this industry, selling out has no weight.

Honestly, that was one of the funniest things I have read all week. And a good counter-point as well.

[BitAddict]

These products would sell out if you encased them in a pile of dog shit. So for this industry, selling out has no weight.

Honestly, that was one of the funniest things I have read all week. And a good counter-point as well.

The difference is that AM customers get what they order on time. No pre-ordering is the key.

BFL always ends f*** up. They just sell because they lie (especially BFL)
Avalon now is doing almost the same, at least their not that bad.
We will see what happen with KNC, CoinTerra, etc....

[philipma1957]

Depends what "do the job well" means.

These guys are going straight for 28nm.

good for them. However friedcat obviously has much more experience with creating chips and devices for bitcoin mining. I would sooner trust Avalon or Asicminer to create new chip before KnCMiner and Cointerra and Hashfast since they have never created bitcoin mining ASIC chip before.

Making a functional ASIC is not excessively complicated. The complex part is the optimization.  I think you'll find it is really FC's team that lacks experience here, having designed only one chip - I quote, from AnandTech,

Ravi’s focus at SARC was on the CPU Mid-Core, including integer execution and special purpose registers

Being the chief architect on CPU mid-cores at one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world makes this guy far more qualified than a team of guys in China that made one simple chip at an archaic process node.

The hardware and boards should be the easy part, given the preponderance of existing packaging companies to partner with (at least for anyone with connections in the industry).

Point is - you should recognize FC has one year of direct experience and this guy has decades of related experience.

this will be settled very soon knc and the other players will have the gear out soon and am will suffer.  or knc and the rest will have delays and am will do okay.

  To quote "bfl just give it 2 weeks time will tell".

[bitsalame]

Higher technology doesn't necessarily translate into market dominance.
It is really about marketing and competence of the management.

Betamax is the prime example.
Or BeOS
Or Digital Audio Tapes (DATs)
Or MiniDiscs
Or the Apple Newton PDA.

Apple has been selling crap phones, and people still buy it.
Some may argue that it is because they are targeting their userbase of idiots, but what I see instead is a company that actually understands the market and adapts itself towards what their targeted community needs.

The question is if these mining companies will have the skills to do the same towards the bitcoin community, after all it is really about understanding their clients and offering them what they really want.

FriedCat was competent enough to deliver exactly what he promised at the time he promised, and that is extremely valuable.
FriedCat was innovative enough to attempt tackling the problem of centralization in a spectacular way that nobody really expected: tiny usb miners. This move was both a commercial success with a symbolic message.

Past performance not necessarily reflects future performance, but past behavior rarely betrays future behavior.
It is humanely almost impossible, even if you consciously want to, to change one's principles, habits and personality.
That's why I trust FriedCat, and I laugh at the FUD on AsicMiner.

Regarding to CoinTerra, they seems great on paper, they have potential, but they could also be the next BetaMax.
This is not an engineering task, this is about running a business.
Also, just like a poker game, it is really not about your cards, but the amount of chips that you have left. In the long run, the one that has the more money wins the game. The same with every other aspect in the real world.

CoinTerra has roughly 1.5 million USD in investments, AND they are asking preorders, delivering late after the difficulty jump.
AsicMiner has hundreds of millions ready to bully anyone who wants to mess with them, hire anyone they want, and they never asked preorders AND always had a impeccable track records of deliveries.

The biggest commodity in the bitcoin world is trust.
AsicMiner is bringing trust by an excellent history of flawless performance.
CoinTerra is attempting to gain trust with a pretentious CV.

If I had to pick a horse, I would stay with AsicMiner.

[AM4Bitcoin]

Sry but were do you got the information that AsicMiner has hundreds of millions $ ? In the last financial report i see
Total: 169,520.57BTC most is send to the investors as dividends.

So 85000BTC at todays price are ~11million $. They have money, but not that much.
Also bitfury is making over 100k$ a day now and i dont think they will stop the development of there chips.

[Draino]

Sry but were do you got the information that AsicMiner has hundreds of millions $ ? In the last financial report i see
Total: 169,520.57BTC most is send to the investors as dividends.

So 85000BTC at todays price are ~11million $. They have money, but not that much.
Also bitfury is making over 100k$ a day now and i dont think they will stop the development of there chips.

If you include the company's value by share price, then asicminer wields hundreds of millions of $.

[AM4Bitcoin]

Yes but can they use that money? What would happen if Bitfountain just started selling shares worth million $? Market capitalization would decrease a lot more then that amount.

[David Chen]

I'm really looking forward to the announcement of the Gen 2 product. Can't wait. I have high hopes. Hopefully it will come at just the right time....  I'm holding shares long, and hope they rebound to some extent to somewhere close to what they were going for last month...

I got faith in F. C.

FC said the Gen 2 product is planned between Nov and Dec. So you have to be patient.

[romerun]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

[Vycid]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

[Ytterbium]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

No reason you couldn't make an ASIC with embedded RAM.  If you made a CPU-style design with enough embedded ram to run litecoin at full speed, a chip like that would probably have lots of other practical uses.

[drawingthesun]

Does ASICMINER have the funds to build a scrypt ASIC?

[Vycid]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

No reason you couldn't make an ASIC with embedded RAM.  If you made a CPU-style design with enough embedded ram to run litecoin at full speed, a chip like that would probably have lots of other practical uses.

Then by definition it wouldn't be an ASIC  

It's not that such a chip is impossible, it's that such a chip does not offer a great enough advantage over GPUs to encourage the kind of aggressive exploitation we're seeing with Bitcoin ASICs. No doubt they will emerge if Litecoin ever achieves Bitcoin's market size, but their appearance will not be accompanied by the same kind of 'gold rush' mentality. It will be an incremental step, offering primarily power efficiency over GPUs (since graphics cards enjoy an economy of scale Litecoin miners will likely never match) - I'd highlight FPGA vs GPU for Bitcoin as a good analogy.

Also, for technical reasons, it is extremely expensive to embed large amounts of RAM into a CPU die. The on-wafer manufacturing processes for logic and memory are very different (in fact we often use different processing tools for memory and logic applications).

[JimiQ84]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

No reason you couldn't make an ASIC with embedded RAM.  If you made a CPU-style design with enough embedded ram to run litecoin at full speed, a chip like that would probably have lots of other practical uses.

Then by definition it wouldn't be an ASIC  

It's not that such a chip is impossible, it's that such a chip does not offer a great enough advantage over GPUs to encourage the kind of aggressive exploitation we're seeing with Bitcoin ASICs. No doubt they will emerge if Litecoin ever achieves Bitcoin's market size, but their appearance will not be accompanied by the same kind of 'gold rush' mentality. It will be an incremental step, offering primarily power efficiency over GPUs (since graphics cards enjoy an economy of scale Litecoin miners will likely never match) - I'd highlight FPGA vs GPU for Bitcoin as a good analogy.

Also, for technical reasons, it is extremely expensive to embed large amounts of RAM into a CPU die. The on-wafer manufacturing processes for logic and memory are very different (in fact we often use different processing tools for memory and logic applications).

for efficient litecoin mining, we will have to wait for memristors. 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster than current RAMs

[empoweoqwj]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

No reason you couldn't make an ASIC with embedded RAM.  If you made a CPU-style design with enough embedded ram to run litecoin at full speed, a chip like that would probably have lots of other practical uses.

Like?

[lophie]

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

No reason you couldn't make an ASIC with embedded RAM.  If you made a CPU-style design with enough embedded ram to run litecoin at full speed, a chip like that would probably have lots of other practical uses.

Like?

Glorified toasters

[David Chen]

hey,guys,divident prediction time!

[lophie]

hey,guys,divident prediction time!

0.07

[robix]

hey,guys,divident prediction time!

0.07

Great