Re: Official Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner (Smaller Devices Now Supported!)
Why have servers at all? For a couple of dollars more, you could equip those boards with an ethernet port and a small ARM processor running linux, with a ready-to-go firmware preinstalled, which would be configured through a web interface. Or possibly a backplane with the ARM processor and ethernet, which has a couple of slots for crypto slave boards containing the ASICs.
I like this idea, however maybe it's a case of walking before you run? Surely the flexibility of PCIe makes it useful in may cases, and adapting that to an all-in-one arm/linux unit is a small (and logical) next step.
I know I have two computers with spare PCIe slots that I'd use to start with, test it out, make sure it all works well. Unless the arm/linux all-in-one miner is cheaper (by some measure)...
I think that not everyone who would consider buying an ASIC miner will want to have a dedicated machine for it - just like today not everyone has a dedicated GPU mining rig.
I'd estimate the cost of the all-in-one standalone solution at about the same as a PCIe card (PCIe is a fast, but completely overkill and complicated interface, which just doesn't belong here). If you consider the price of the PC mainboard / CPU the standalone solution will definitely be cheaper.
The ASIC card would be dedicated anyway. So why occupy a PC with it, if you can have the same functionality for the same price without the need for a PC? Yeah, you might save an ethernet switch port
