Hype or not, it's fairly accurate. Spondoolies has always mentioned in the past that their margins were not great. In addition to ASICs, each board in the SP20 contains 16 VRM phases (twice as many as an S1) compared to the S5's zero VRMs. The controller was designed entirely in-house instead of leveraging an off-the-shelf devboard. By a pure components count I bet the SP20 is over the S5 by a full order of magnitude. The PCB very likely contains quite a bit more copper as well, given the current density required for their ASIC topology. That they sold SP20s at the same price point as an S5, I'd believe the last of the machines they actually took a loss on.


I'm going to try as hard as I can to make a solid miner design in the next several months, and if I can do what I want to do you'll eat those words.

Anyway, MBP's miner buyback.