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Topic
Board Hardware
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: DragonMint 16TH/S halongmining.com
by
StevenMosher
on 12/04/2018, 06:24:27 UTC
⭐ Merited by HagssFIN (1)
It's simple enough.

10nm

which fab?

how many masks  for that 10nm?

Answers to those two will explain a lot

I am really interested in hearing the answer to this question.  10nm with the ASICBoost?  I don't see the benefit.  If you had to guess, which fab did they use or do you think the whole 10nm is fabrication?


  10nm.  

   The first thing is most customers do not know the right questions to ask a mining company to ferret out if they are bullshit or not. So, I encourage everyone to ask the right questions about chips, fabrication,  etc.  If the guy doesnt know what he is talking about it will be clear right away.  

Speculations:  In the beginning a bunch of folks were saying it was a 16nm chip.  And some speculated that it was just
and overclocked S9. Hmm, dunno. The problem with it being a  16nm  chip from a new company is that TSMC would not give a new customer any wafer capicity.

How about  TSMC  10nm?  Well if they answer TSMC  10nm,  then that   fuels another speculation that buzzed around on twitter
that Halong  is  just a Bitmain  subsidary  and  it's Bitmain's method for selling chips. It also helps them clean up their
act  and  diffuse concerns about the concentration in mining. Information vacuums  are never good as they fuel speculation.


Maybe TSMC 12?  performance is somewhat consistent with that.
 
Intel?   Nope.  


Samsung 10nm.   From a performance and shipping standpoint samsung 10nm makes sense because  there is an apparent  yeild issue ( there always is )  and because there is  what looks to be a voltage leak problem which could lead to excessive power consumption. You'll get chips that run at  sub  .09J/GH  and  devices that run above this.  If you can just run the thing through a variety of frequencies and see what happens to the power consumption that will be  a good clue. Maybe they can tweak the  the process to reduce the portion of chips that might have this issue.  Ideally,  they would do  different SKUs,  those that run between 15 and 16 and those that run faster. Hard to do unless you have big volume. In any case  if it is samsung 10nm, then the best thing to do is just to address the performace variations and explain what you are doing to reduce/improve the situation. If they are tweaking the process to run at a fast corner (for example), just tell folks. We are tweaking the process.
If you build chips  it is what you do.

In the end someone somewhere will decap  chip or take it to their dentist for an xray and post the dimensions. I should
do a bounty on that.  If you know the dimensions of the bare die that will tell alot. Has anyone decaped a Bitmain chip?

Finally, the other thing is some guys  use  chip specs  to derive machine specs.  That means you might spec  16TH .07  from
the  single chip performance  ( averages of lots) but when you actually build a machine  its  15-16TH  and  .1  at the wall.
what we do is a little different.  We spec machines  after they are built and tested. So  13TH,  actually means a tested
MINIMUM  13, and empirically  75% of the machines  run at 13.5 or higher.   Ideally there would be some kind of standard
benchmarking  but I dont think the industry is ready for that.

Anyway,  more information from everyone, open information from everyone is always a good thing.



Moderator's note: This post was edited by frodocooper to trim the quote from NODEhaven.