ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[mrlupin]

What is the "network T operator force"?

[1713554704]

1713554704

[jjdub7]

Lol, apparently the rough, rough translation for network hashrate (its an old translation joke from some tech salon announcements over the summer).  I think its literally saying the equivalent in Chinese of "network terahashes produced by the miners"

[Bonam]

I think you're missing the point of the graph. It's purpose is to illustrate, given certain parameters, what the final steady state network hashrate could end up being. Barring large changes in price or available technology, eventually the network will get to the point that even a large operation in a location with extremely cheap electricity will not be able to break even in X days even without difficulty changing.

The assumption is fundamentally invalid because there will always be changes in "available technology". Even once bitcoin mining ASICs reach the cutting edge in terms of modern process size, algorithm optimization, computational efficiency, etc, major companies in larger markets will continue to push the bounds of technology forward and ASIC manufacturers will benefit from these new technologies, releasing better and better products. The cost of a given amount of computing power is cut in half on about a yearly basis. So long as advanced human civilization exists, technology will continue to progress and there will never be a "steady state". And, so long as bitcoin remains valuable enough to warrant anyone to bother mining it with custom equipment, any miner bought at a given point in time will provide less hash rate than a miner bought a year later for the same amount of money. And that makes the graph not applicable in any real situation.

Remember where the discussion originated. I made the claim that even today, many miners fail to ever break even or just barely break even. The graph was posted as a rebuttal to that, to show that in fact capital expenditures are easy to recover and that we are far from the point where that would no longer be the case. But it only shows that in a constant difficulty environment. In a rising difficulty environment, say 10% per period, my statement is closer to the truth, as can be quickly checked with any of the conventional online mining profit calculators. And, said rising difficulty environment is the real world in which miners are trying to make back their investment and profit.

[asdfghj]

Miners improve, hence 5 lines each depicting a different J/GH.  Difficulty varies along the y-axis and is not constant in the plot.

Thanks for posting the plot, it is a nice depiction.

[electerium]

xhomer-


you are wrong.


That graph is actually a simulation of network hash rate per given variables. It could be used to calculate other things, such as profitability, but that's not its intended use and if you wanted to calculate miner profitability you wouldnt use that simulation- its redundant.

[jdany]

Is there a current AM shareholder table?

I know someone was keeping a private ledger, but, is there an official one?

The one I recall seeing had addresses, share amount and forum name (if known)

[hdbuck]

Is there a current AM shareholder table?
I know someone was keeping a private ledger, but, is there an official one?
The one I recall seeing had addresses, share amount and forum name (if known)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnxKtjWqWJGodC1fR3JDSFBpZ2tGbjBqdzJoeFlpOXc&usp=sharing#gid=0

edit: not sure where it came from tho. i just saved it a while ago.

[jdany]

Is there a current AM shareholder table?
I know someone was keeping a private ledger, but, is there an official one?
The one I recall seeing had addresses, share amount and forum name (if known)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnxKtjWqWJGodC1fR3JDSFBpZ2tGbjBqdzJoeFlpOXc&usp=sharing#gid=0

edit: not sure where it came from tho. i just saved it a while ago.

Thanks buck!
Based on the dividend, it looks like March 5th of 2014.
It would be interesting to see how shares have consolidated from 1343 direct shareholders to...

[MrTeal]

I think you're missing the point of the graph. It's purpose is to illustrate, given certain parameters, what the final steady state network hashrate could end up being. Barring large changes in price or available technology, eventually the network will get to the point that even a large operation in a location with extremely cheap electricity will not be able to break even in X days even without difficulty changing.

The assumption is fundamentally invalid because there will always be changes in "available technology". Even once bitcoin mining ASICs reach the cutting edge in terms of modern process size, algorithm optimization, computational efficiency, etc, major companies in larger markets will continue to push the bounds of technology forward and ASIC manufacturers will benefit from these new technologies, releasing better and better products. The cost of a given amount of computing power is cut in half on about a yearly basis. So long as advanced human civilization exists, technology will continue to progress and there will never be a "steady state". And, so long as bitcoin remains valuable enough to warrant anyone to bother mining it with custom equipment, any miner bought at a given point in time will provide less hash rate than a miner bought a year later for the same amount of money. And that makes the graph not applicable in any real situation.

Remember where the discussion originated. I made the claim that even today, many miners fail to ever break even or just barely break even. The graph was posted as a rebuttal to that, to show that in fact capital expenditures are easy to recover and that we are far from the point where that would no longer be the case. But it only shows that in a constant difficulty environment. In a rising difficulty environment, say 10% per period, my statement is closer to the truth, as can be quickly checked with any of the conventional online mining profit calculators. And, said rising difficulty environment is the real world in which miners are trying to make back their investment and profit.

I think there's still room to go in terms of power efficiency, but I don't know how much higher it will go. A lot of it is predicated on price. I honestly don't think there is much left to be done algorithmically to improve efficiency; the simplicity of the SHA256 means it's pretty easy to optimize. There's probably still a good bit of work to do on layout, but even that will taper out as people get designs optimized. Looking at what is currently the best implementation (Bitfury), with perfect scaling he might get ~0.2J/GH on his existing 55nm design shrunk to 28nm.
I personally think the limit of 28nm will be closer to 0.2J/GH than 0.1J/GH. You're being quite optimistic on the cost of computing power halving every year, IMO.

The biggest variable in all of this is price though. It was easy to tape out new 28nm designs and order a bunch of wafer starts when you could charge $5k for a box with <$1k in parts other than the ASIC itself. If you do get someone down to 0.2J/GH, you're already 3x better that anything else on the market at 28nm. Going from there, you're going to be looking at marginal improvements with each new spin. With margins very tight, you need to really look at what kind of income you'll generate in order to justify the cost of the new design.

I take Puppet's spreadsheet to be a simple demonstration tool, I don't think his intention is to imply it's an accurate model. I would say his assumptions are much more sound than your main premise though. If even with free electricity a miner cannot recover their capital cost, NO ONE WILL BUY MINING EQUIPMENT. Sorry for the caps, but this keeps on coming up and it's a fundamental logic flaw. With free electricity your costs of running equipment are negligible. To say that the capital costs will never be recovered assumes that income approaches 0 as the network hashrate approaches infinity.

Answer one simple question, with the assumption that continued increases in difficulty will mean that even people with free electricity can't recovery their capital costs in equipment, who do you think will be buying the ~250PH/s worth of mining hardware necessary to even double the current hashrate?

[rudi]

I don't think 28nm is the node size where we're going to hit Moore's law. 20nm chips are already being produced and TSMC will mass-produce 16nm chips in Q1 2015 (for Apple at first). I suspect the targeted 0.1J/GH are to be achieved with a smaller node size than 28nm.

[MrTeal]

I don't think 28nm is the node size where we're going to hit Moore's law. 20nm chips are already being produced and TSMC will mass-produce 16nm chips in Q1 2015 (for Apple at first). I suspect the targeted 0.1J/GH are to be achieved with a smaller node size than 28nm.

A (bad) 20nm chip was produced, but it was also funded at a time when
1. 6 month preorders were still SOP
2. Margins were extremely high
3. Mining income was still an order of magnitude higher than operational cost

Even the likes of nVidia are complaining that the economics of moving to 20nm don't make sense and that the performance gains aren't there, which is part of the reason even the new top of the line GTX980 is on the same mature 28nm node as the GPUs that debuted in Jan 2012.

Even then, Bitcoin mining is so embarrassingly parallel that it makes even a GPU look inherently serial. Unlike a GPU where two 1152-core GTX760s in SLI will perform noticeably worse than a single 2304-core GTX780, Bitcoin mining scales perfectly. There is much less pressure to move down a node as new hardware doesn't really give any new capability outside of possible efficiency gains.

Similarly to the question above, by summer 2015 if the price doesn't move Bitcoin mining hardware will be sold essentially at cost as the market saturates. Given that per gigahash 16nm isn't likely to be any cheaper than 28nm, who is going to fund the development and production of a 16nm ASIC when they would have to hope to sell a couple exahash/s worth of hardware just to recover their initial investment?

[jimmothy]

I think you're missing the point of the graph. It's purpose is to illustrate, given certain parameters, what the final steady state network hashrate could end up being. Barring large changes in price or available technology, eventually the network will get to the point that even a large operation in a location with extremely cheap electricity will not be able to break even in X days even without difficulty changing.

The assumption is fundamentally invalid because there will always be changes in "available technology". Even once bitcoin mining ASICs reach the cutting edge in terms of modern process size, algorithm optimization, computational efficiency, etc, major companies in larger markets will continue to push the bounds of technology forward and ASIC manufacturers will benefit from these new technologies, releasing better and better products. The cost of a given amount of computing power is cut in half on about a yearly basis. So long as advanced human civilization exists, technology will continue to progress and there will never be a "steady state". And, so long as bitcoin remains valuable enough to warrant anyone to bother mining it with custom equipment, any miner bought at a given point in time will provide less hash rate than a miner bought a year later for the same amount of money. And that makes the graph not applicable in any real situation.

Remember where the discussion originated. I made the claim that even today, many miners fail to ever break even or just barely break even. The graph was posted as a rebuttal to that, to show that in fact capital expenditures are easy to recover and that we are far from the point where that would no longer be the case. But it only shows that in a constant difficulty environment. In a rising difficulty environment, say 10% per period, my statement is closer to the truth, as can be quickly checked with any of the conventional online mining profit calculators. And, said rising difficulty environment is the real world in which miners are trying to make back their investment and profit.

I think there's still room to go in terms of power efficiency, but I don't know how much higher it will go. A lot of it is predicated on price. I honestly don't think there is much left to be done algorithmically to improve efficiency; the simplicity of the SHA256 means it's pretty easy to optimize. There's probably still a good bit of work to do on layout, but even that will taper out as people get designs optimized. Looking at what is currently the best implementation (Bitfury), with perfect scaling he might get ~0.2J/GH on his existing 55nm design shrunk to 28nm.
I personally think the limit of 28nm will be closer to 0.2J/GH than 0.1J/GH. You're being quite optimistic on the cost of computing power halving every year, IMO.

The biggest variable in all of this is price though. It was easy to tape out new 28nm designs and order a bunch of wafer starts when you could charge $5k for a box with <$1k in parts other than the ASIC itself. If you do get someone down to 0.2J/GH, you're already 3x better that anything else on the market at 28nm. Going from there, you're going to be looking at marginal improvements with each new spin. With margins very tight, you need to really look at what kind of income you'll generate in order to justify the cost of the new design.

I take Puppet's spreadsheet to be a simple demonstration tool, I don't think his intention is to imply it's an accurate model. I would say his assumptions are much more sound than your main premise though. If even with free electricity a miner cannot recover their capital cost, NO ONE WILL BUY MINING EQUIPMENT. Sorry for the caps, but this keeps on coming up and it's a fundamental logic flaw. With free electricity your costs of running equipment are negligible. To say that the capital costs will never be recovered assumes that income approaches 0 as the network hashrate approaches infinity.

Answer one simple question, with the assumption that continued increases in difficulty will mean that even people with free electricity can't recovery their capital costs in equipment, who do you think will be buying the ~250PH/s worth of mining hardware necessary to even double the current hashrate?

Puppets tool is not meant to predict when/howfast the difficulty will increase. It's only meant to demonstrate how the parameters affect the difficulty and give you a rough idea of what you would expect if we reached equilibrium and technology stopped advancing.

Of course technology will still advance but it won't be at the current 10%/2 weeks rate. I'd guess ~1%/diff increases if it follows Moore's law.

If even with free electricity a miner cannot recover their capital cost, NO ONE WILL BUY MINING EQUIPMENT.

Exactly this. Large scale mining operations do not have access to free electricity and need to be earning massive profits if they want to continue spending millions on NRE.

I don't understand how people can say that nobody can make a profit mining because there is some entity out there that will continue adding hashing power far beyond the point everyone is mining at a loss.

[Puppet]

Moore's law states that transistor density doubles every 18 months. Something which no longer is true, but even it where, for bitcoin transistor density is almost irrelevant at this point; so what if you can cram twice as many cores in a chip, if it consume twice as much power you havent really gained much. You reduced the silicon cost per GH, but thats arguably one of the least important metrics right now.  Moore's law says nothing about compute efficiency, and I think its fair to say the industry is heading in to a brick wall in that regard too.

Thats not to say I dont expect improvements over where we are now, there is probably still a lot to be had from improving power delivery and riding down the schmoo plot from high voltage/highest performance per mm² to low voltage/highest power efficiency, but thats pretty much going to be a one time deal.

[jimmothy]

Moore's law states that transistor density doubles every 18 months. Something which no longer is true, but even it where, for bitcoin transistor density is almost irrelevant at this point; so what if you can cram twice as many cores in a chip, if it consume twice as much power you havent really gained much. You reduced the silicon cost per GH, but thats arguably one of the least important metrics right now.  Moore's law says nothing about compute efficiency, and I think its fair to say the industry is heading in to a brick wall in that regard too.

Thats not to say I dont expect improvements over where we are now, there is probably still a lot to be had from improving power delivery and riding down the schmoo plot from high voltage/highest performance per mm² to low voltage/highest power efficiency, but thats pretty much going to be a one time deal.

Source for Moore's law no longer being true?

It's true Moore's law says nothing about efficiency but Koomey's law says it should double even quicker.

[Mabsark]

Moore's law states that transistor density doubles every 18 months. Something which no longer is true, but even it where, for bitcoin transistor density is almost irrelevant at this point; so what if you can cram twice as many cores in a chip, if it consume twice as much power you havent really gained much.

It's not irrelevant at all. The smaller transistors use less power. Just because the transistor density doubles, that doesn't mean that the power consumption doubles too. For example, you could end up with twice the hash power for the same power consumption with a die shrink.

What it means is that you can fit more hash power in your DC.

[Puppet]

The smaller transistors use less power.

Not as a rule. Generally smaller gates can work with lower voltage, and that is what is increases power efficiency, its not a direct result and its increasingly untrue. 20 and 16nm offer next to no voltage drop, other than what can be achieved using finfets (unrelated to feature size).

Just because the transistor density doubles, that doesn't mean that the power consumption doubles too. For example, you could end up with twice the hash power for the same power consumption with a die shrink.

quite the opposite, just because you can shrink a transistor doesnt mean it will use less, let alone half as much power.  So you cram more on a die, but power density goes up, not exactly a huge advantage for bitcoin asics which already stretch the limits of power delivery, packaging and cooling.

[Bonam]

I take Puppet's spreadsheet to be a simple demonstration tool, I don't think his intention is to imply it's an accurate model. I would say his assumptions are much more sound than your main premise though. If even with free electricity a miner cannot recover their capital cost, NO ONE WILL BUY MINING EQUIPMENT. Sorry for the caps, but this keeps on coming up and it's a fundamental logic flaw. With free electricity your costs of running equipment are negligible. To say that the capital costs will never be recovered assumes that income approaches 0 as the network hashrate approaches infinity.

Answer one simple question, with the assumption that continued increases in difficulty will mean that even people with free electricity can't recovery their capital costs in equipment, who do you think will be buying the ~250PH/s worth of mining hardware necessary to even double the current hashrate?

People who can get the mining equipment a lot cheaper than it is normally priced for the "consumer". That is, people placing gigantic bulk orders, people with exclusive partnerships with manufacturers, and the manufacturers themselves.

[jimmothy]

I take Puppet's spreadsheet to be a simple demonstration tool, I don't think his intention is to imply it's an accurate model. I would say his assumptions are much more sound than your main premise though. If even with free electricity a miner cannot recover their capital cost, NO ONE WILL BUY MINING EQUIPMENT. Sorry for the caps, but this keeps on coming up and it's a fundamental logic flaw. With free electricity your costs of running equipment are negligible. To say that the capital costs will never be recovered assumes that income approaches 0 as the network hashrate approaches infinity.

Answer one simple question, with the assumption that continued increases in difficulty will mean that even people with free electricity can't recovery their capital costs in equipment, who do you think will be buying the ~250PH/s worth of mining hardware necessary to even double the current hashrate?

People who can get the mining equipment a lot cheaper than it is normally priced for the "consumer". That is, people placing gigantic bulk orders, people with exclusive partnerships with manufacturers, and the manufacturers themselves.

Doesn't matter what the J/GH is if you can never recover the capital cost of miners even with free electricity, which is where bitcoin mining stands right now.

So can some people profit from mining or not?

[MrTeal]

I take Puppet's spreadsheet to be a simple demonstration tool, I don't think his intention is to imply it's an accurate model. I would say his assumptions are much more sound than your main premise though. If even with free electricity a miner cannot recover their capital cost, NO ONE WILL BUY MINING EQUIPMENT. Sorry for the caps, but this keeps on coming up and it's a fundamental logic flaw. With free electricity your costs of running equipment are negligible. To say that the capital costs will never be recovered assumes that income approaches 0 as the network hashrate approaches infinity.

Answer one simple question, with the assumption that continued increases in difficulty will mean that even people with free electricity can't recovery their capital costs in equipment, who do you think will be buying the ~250PH/s worth of mining hardware necessary to even double the current hashrate?

People who can get the mining equipment a lot cheaper than it is normally priced for the "consumer". That is, people placing gigantic bulk orders, people with exclusive partnerships with manufacturers, and the manufacturers themselves.

What are you going on about? All you're describing is that some larger groups can get equipment cheaper than others, which is no different than some people getting cheaper power than others. Change $330 per TH/s to something else like $200/TH/s, and you're done. All that does is change one variable. In the end, you still end up with the same result; even the manufacturer won't make more equipment as it is not cost effective to do so, and the hashrate will stabilize.

[Mabsark]

The smaller transistors use less power.

Not as a rule. Generally smaller gates can work with lower voltage, and that is what is increases power efficiency, its not a direct result and its increasingly untrue. 20 and 16nm offer next to no voltage drop, other than what can be achieved using finfets (unrelated to feature size).

Just because the transistor density doubles, that doesn't mean that the power consumption doubles too. For example, you could end up with twice the hash power for the same power consumption with a die shrink.

quite the opposite, just because you can shrink a transistor doesnt mean it will use less, let alone half as much power.  So you cram more on a die, but power density goes up, not exactly a huge advantage for bitcoin asics which already stretch the limits of power delivery, packaging and cooling.

Yes, as a rule. What you are saying is simply wrong.

TSMC's 20nm process technology can provide 30 percent higher speed, 1.9 times the density, or 25 percent less power than its 28nm technology.

Comparing with 20SoC technology, 16FF+ provides extra 40% higher speed and 60% power saving.

Also, I didn't say a die shrink would use half the power, I said it could. For example, going from 130nm to 40nm.