Post
Topic
Board Securities
Re: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It
by
Strange Vlad
on 03/09/2013, 17:12:07 UTC
Depends what "do the job well" means.

These guys are going straight for 28nm.

good for them. However friedcat obviously has much more experience with creating chips and devices for bitcoin mining. I would sooner trust Avalon or Asicminer to create new chip before KnCMiner and Cointerra and Hashfast since they have never created bitcoin mining ASIC chip before.

Making a functional ASIC is not excessively complicated. The complex part is the optimization.  I think you'll find it is really FC's team that lacks experience here, having designed only one chip - I quote, from AnandTech,

Quote
Ravi’s focus at SARC was on the CPU Mid-Core, including integer execution and special purpose registers

Being the chief architect on CPU mid-cores at one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world makes this guy far more qualified than a team of guys in China that made one simple chip at an archaic process node.

The hardware and boards should be the easy part, given the preponderance of existing packaging companies to partner with (at least for anyone with connections in the industry).

Point is - you should recognize FC has one year of direct experience and this guy has decades of related experience.

The notorious counterexample to what you said is Bitfury.  The guy had NO prior experience, NO special education, and yet somehow managed to develop a quite successful and well-optimized chip from scratch, within less than a year (including self-education), all by himself!

Now please don't imply that superstar engineer can make orders of magnitude difference.  Bitcoin ASIC is not a CPU core, it's just hundreds of small and simple identical SHA256 calculators, not really much to optimize there.