Post
Topic
Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: Baikal Giant N - Cryptonight, Cryptonight-lite ASIC miner
by
DigitalCruncher
on 13/03/2018, 21:07:47 UTC
I really wish people would stop calling FPGA's ASICs.  Baikal (so far) has only made FPGA mining rigs.  There is a huge difference between an FPGA and an ASIC.  An FPGA is not that much different from a GPU.  Anyone can get one.  Anyone can buy a Zynq FPGA board from digikey for $89-$199, or a higher end one for more money, and if you take a little while to learn how to program it, you can hash any algorithm except equihash & ethash.  Furthermore, your ROI will be better than a GPU in almost every case, in some cases dramatically better (as Baikal showed with the X10 and Giant-B).


Are you really sure that Baikals X10/B are FPGA? (Which FPGA, by the way?) While it is enterely possible, technical characteristics of these products are not typical for FPGA. Especially the low power consumption.

As for ROI I wouldn't expect good ROI from entry and mid-range FPGA boards because of their weak power supplys. We need propertly designed professional grade DC/DC for core voltage, that is rarely seen in practice.