ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[Puppet]

Try putting 10, 50, 100 or 1000 of them in a room and you will see what "statistical noise" sounds and feels like.

Sure, but it would still only be 1.58% of the power consumption as long as you dont need AC. Which of course isnt likely, but if you followed the thread, that was my point.

[Dexter770221]

Difficulty growth seems to be faltering finally.

It's just a little silence before storm. It will flatter in 50PH range....

[asdfghj]

One thing no one has mentioned and i would like to hear opinion on.

With immersion cooling (I expect) the temperature is constant, deviating only slightly from the boiling point of the liquid.  Air is different because its low heat conductance, the more btu output the hotter the chip gets because it can't be carried away quickly.  With such high thermal densities being tested above this won't be a problem.

So what will being able to lock the chips temperature in at a cool 40C be?
(Marginally?) More efficient?
Over clocking potential?

The writeup mentions a longer timeline for large scale production but maybe a consumer device (enclosed cube) with immersion cooling is doable and possibly improves w/GH? Wishful thinking?

Also, could this rescue a gen2 design which had poor thermal properties?

[Rival]

I think the most overlooked statement is that there are currently no commercial data centers available that are designed to to handle the requirements of of a world-class farm. And definitely none that can scale to the farms of the future.

The brick wall that AM hit was not an inability to create chips and boards. It was finding a place to put them. The datacenters of today were not designed for the sort of high-heat high-density equipment that make bitcoin mining profitable. They were built for commercial servers and hard drive arrays... very different. Trying to build a mining farm can quickly overwhelm the resources and capacity of a datacenter built for common blade servers. Expansion starts to get really expensive when you count electricity, cooling, and especially infrastucture and even the building itself.

So he solved it.

Building? Poof, it's gone. Replaced by a $3000 shipping container. Cooling? 97% of costs eliminated. Not just high density of chips, but high density of boards. The very definition of optimization.

AM is doing for farms what ASIC technology did to video cards. Making anyone using generic facilities outdated, under-performing, uncompetitive, and obsolete.

He created ASCF: Application-Specific Computing Facility. (Coined here first!)

FC is so far ahead of the curve he is beyond the horizon.

[binaryFate]

Building? Poof, it's gone. Replaced by a $3000 shipping container.

What are you referring to? Franchising? Or did I miss something?

[hlynur]

Building? Poof, it's gone. Replaced by a $3000 shipping container.

What are you referring to? Franchising? Or did I miss something?

i think he's referring to this:

Not sure if this has been posted before. Some updates from AM:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0ByWHHc0u_thNSWhHS18xM2ZXSUU

[muyuu]

Difficulty growth seems to be faltering finally.

It's just a little silence before storm. It will flatter in 50PH range....

[binaryFate]

Building? Poof, it's gone. Replaced by a $3000 shipping container.

What are you referring to? Franchising? Or did I miss something?

i think he's referring to this:

Not sure if this has been posted before. Some updates from AM:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0ByWHHc0u_thNSWhHS18xM2ZXSUU

Thanks! I had missed that... 

[chairforce1]

Meanwhile no block found in last 40hours.

https://blockchain.info/blocks/ASICMiner

Block mined today.

[Puppet]

yeah just a $3000 container and some  bottles of fluorinert. lol
for the record, similar solutions exist commercially, and are sold (in containers) for $2.per watt.  that's more affordable than a brick and mortar datacenter but the price of the container itself doesn't really matter

I would also dispute that datacenters suitable for mining  don't exist  the requirements for hpc and gpu compute are quite similar.

[hephaist0s]

FC is so far ahead of the curve he is beyond the horizon.

Yes. And AM is the only company showing sings of trying to implement a strategy for years, not months, into the future. This is endgame stuff.

[bitfair]

FC is so far ahead of the curve he is beyond the horizon.

FC changed the game. Again.

Strange to see so little excitement over this development, it is pretty significant. Being the first to create such a large ASIC farm, AM naturally encountered problems quite early that others will face eventually (or are currently facing) -- and saw the opportunity to solve it, then package the solution for others to benefit.

The brilliance of this move may not be obvious at the moment -- someone running a few mining boxes in their mother's basement is unlikely to encounter these problems -- but as mining becomes more professionalized, lowering their costs with a solution like this may be the only way to be profitable.

[damiano]

FC is so far ahead of the curve he is beyond the horizon.

FC changed the game. Again.

Strange to see so little excitement over this development, it is pretty significant. Being the first to create such a large ASIC farm, AM naturally encountered problems quite early that others will face eventually (or are currently facing) -- and saw the opportunity to solve it, then package the solution for others to benefit.

The brilliance of this move may not be obvious at the moment -- someone running a few mining boxes in their mother's basement is unlikely to encounter these problems -- but as mining becomes more professionalized, lowering their costs with a solution like this may be the only way to be profitable.

Give it a few weeks to set in.  They need to start producing

AM will rise once again. 

[Rival]

This will not affect the dividends for some time I am sure. Everyone seems to price shares by the dividends. That being said, I expect the share prices to languish until the dividends explode. By then it will be too late to get on the bandwagon, as always occurs.

Buy when there is blood on the streets. It is pennies on the dollar.

[aahzmundus]

Questions is now... do I save up and buy that board seat now?  Or give up on that dream XD

[LainZ]

Still "Inventing it" friedcat, well done.

[Puppet]

That reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Modular_Datacenter

Yep. I was looking in to similar solutions to put somewhere with cheap electricity.
There are many suppliers, prices are harder to find. But this caught my attention, just to have a reference point:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/15/data_centre/

The smallest SGI solution costs $100K and provides room and cooling for 204 U and 148KW or 51 Terraminer IV's.
Thats actually fairly affordable.

By comparison, grcooling offeres a submersion cooling container for $2/W
http://www.grcooling.com/docs/2013-07-09-Containerized-CarnotJet-Systems-Now-Available-from-Green-Revolution-Cooling.pdf
 
$2 * 148K = ~$300K

3x more expensive for the same capacity.

Now Im not saying it cant be done cheaper for either approach, but Im not so convinced submersion is the way to go.

[cs54]

So basically, Friedcat is Heisenberg, and he's moving operations to the Winnebago. Amazing.

[Bargraphics]

So basically, Friedcat is Heisenberg, and he's moving operations to the Winnebago. Amazing.

Heisencat?

[bitsalame]

Great looking product, fascinating concept, but as stated by others I really fail to see any huge application or sales for it.

No-one other than Bitcoin miners needs such a product, so there's no outside market. It clearly isn't viable for most home miners, so it's limited to a small number of large-scale miners and AM themselves. So whats the market globally for these - half a dozen?

It also only helps cool mining operations more effectively, so won't sell anymore chips or change ROI, since ROI on most chips doesn't happen even if electricity was free.

It's only tangible benefit will be to AM's own mining operations to reduce electricity costs, which in the long-term become more of a relative issue, but this could still be better solved and beaten by mining operations that simply exist in areas of cheaper electricity or where less cooling is required eg data-centres in cold areas.

Sure?
1) http://phys.org/news/2012-09-intel-math-oil-dunk-cooler-servers.html
2) http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/12/21/facebook-tests-immersion-cooling/

Yeah, no market at all.