Re: 21 co introducing bitcoin [mining+] computer for $399.99 (unofficial thread)
Assuming 0.16 is bottom-clock efficiency, that puts it at about 10% better than BM1385. Not really revolutionary by comparison.
+121 1st gen was TSMC 40nm
21 2nd gen was Intel 22nm, power numbers of about 0.57 J/GH at nominal working point.
21 3rd gen was another Intel 22nm, they aimed for 0.22 J/GH according to their investors materials (taped out 24/8 2014, silicon was expected in November 2014)
I believe this is the 3rd gen. It's very bad number for a Intel 22nn, which is FinFET process.
A quote I liked from their presentation: "Approaching Moore's law: best efficiency is likely ~0.15 W/GH/s @ 14nm"
So funny.
I believe that they're working on TSMC 16nm, or Intel 14nm 4th gen.
They're not doing custom design, taking a standard cell brute force approach.
Look at the "ASIC Design Engineer" job description here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150821050459/https://21.co/#jobs
Pure waste of funds, IMHO.
As usual, you are very well informed, Guy!
To be fair, with 0.16 J/GH this would be the most efficient chip in the wild so far.
The 0.6V BM1385 value is just quadratic extrapolations of the 0.66V value. Try it, it fits perfectly. IMHO too perfect for a measured value.
Anyway, 21 really screwed it up with the GH/mm2 value. In best case they have here about 2 GH/mm2 (for sure not with 0.16 J/GH). This is a good GH/mm2 value for 28nm, but for 22nm it should be 3 ... 4 GH/mm2. Otherwise this chip will be simply too expensive in production to be competitive for standard miners.