Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: CoinTerra announces its first ASIC - Hash-Rate greater than 500 GH/s
by
JohnyBigs
on 18/08/2013, 04:06:39 UTC
Cointerra is talking about a 500 GH chip. Are you really trying to claim that their chip uses $500 of silicon? Or even $400 worth? I don't think that silicon price is the limiting factor in any of this; I just looked up the price of silicon and unless I did something very wrong it looks to me like that amount of money would buy you like a KG. Additionally, many of the costs you are talking about (e.g. testing) are probably about the same regardless of number of chips on a board.

Until we see Cointerra's dimensions it is hard to say.  As for looking up the price of silicon, make sure you are looking at the cost of a printed wafer.  Blank wafers are used by FABs to print chips.  Those 28nm FABs costs billions to build and have a limited economical lifespan.  The price of raw silicon is pretty irrelevant.

Still I don't really care enough.  If people want to wait for sub $1 per GH/s assembled miners well let them.  I don't own any of these companies.


Quote
Again Avalon has hundreds of chips on their unit, and they were able to make a profit on it at $1200 and that was hundreds of chips so I'm sorry but i think you are way off with your pricing.

The number of chips doesn't really matter at the fabrication level.  Bigger more powerful chips are cheaper in the long run because it requires less  post FAB assembly.  Avalon's chip is on an ancient process (110nm) and is only 16mm.  If the same chip was die shrunk down to 55nm it would only be 4nm in size.  The wafer would cost the same amount but compared to bitfury an Avalon55 would get almost 4x as many chips per wafer thus the cost per chip would be lower but the cost per GH/s wouldn't.

You can't really compare Avalon to 28nm chips but lets assume their cost was $1 per GH/s.  That doesn't mean it is $1 per chip, it is $1 per GH/s.  Smaller chip = more chips per wafer = lower cost per chip.  Their $1200 product would only have $100 to $200 in Silicon production costs.  You don't see how that would be profitable?




What are you even arguing? Your own calculations show that Avalon is profitable at $1200 with only $100-$200 in Silicon. So please explain to me how $1/gh is production cost for CoinTerra?

That means CoinTerra has a production cost of $500 per chip, are you smoking something?