Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: Official Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner (Just Released!)
by
greenlander
on 21/05/2011, 01:46:16 UTC
well that would be very nice, so all us with no big money could try too Cheesy

If you just want to fool around, start with this:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/AES-S6MB-LX9.htm

It's just $89.

You wouldn't be able to unroll the loop at all, though.  (fpgaminer fully unrolls the loop so it's heavily pipelined.)  You'd probably have re-use the same hardware for every step of the algorithm, so you'd get about 1/128th of the performance.  If you were clever you might be able to do more than that and have around 4 pipeline stages or so, then you'd get 1/32th of the speed.

I'd respect you if you got 1 MH/s out of it.

Still, it could be a fun project for $89.  Just don't expect to do any serious mining.

It appears to come with a crippled version of their tool chain.  However, you can download the full Xilinx tool chain at (ahem) substantially below retail value over bittorrent.