Quote from: NODEhaven on April 10, 2018, 03:45:18 AM

Quote from: StevenMosher on April 09, 2018, 08:50:17 AM

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.