Who was playing around with it? I'd like to contact that guy to avoid duplicating effort 
$9000 is certainly way off, but you should also consider the cost of board production, power supply components, and higher prices if you order lower quantities. If you include the cost of design and prototyping respins, $9000 might be close for the first couple of boards. Once the design has been polished I'd think $2000 for 1.2ghash/s might be possible.
$9000 is certainly way off, but you should also consider the cost of board production, power supply components, and higher prices if you order lower quantities. If you include the cost of design and prototyping respins, $9000 might be close for the first couple of boards. Once the design has been polished I'd think $2000 for 1.2ghash/s might be possible.
Which guy? The one thread is here. The user is ArtForz in post #30
Pusle was the one telling me of his 150mhash/s in ISE. He said the design wasn't complete and that it should be possible to pump out much more than that. He (or someone) said that FPGAMiner was able to achieve 190mhash/s on the LX150. But I haven't really been able to find any posts from FPGAMiner stating this.
I've been cramming a lot of information RE bitcoin and FPGA for the past week. So it's all still kind of jumbled in my brain.
By my calculation
16 LX150 chips on a x1 pci-e card = 3Ghash/s
16 Chips = 2480$ (at web advertised prices, should be possible to get it for less)
PCB FAB, PSU, ETC estimated that it couldn't cost much more than 250$ per board with a large order.
So, 3Ghash/s for roughly 2730$ (probably less). About 1.09Mhash/s per $ which is more cost effective than a 6990 currently (not to mention the 300 watts of electricity you'll save per GPU you replace).
From what I understand the biggest downside of the LX150 is that it's hard to roll 1.5 engines per chip due to design issues. Again, from my calculations (which are probably wrong in some way). The LX150 could do 3 partial engines using 120K of 150K LU and generate 3hash per 2 cycles. With real world values of around 250mhash/s per chip.
I've got an EE in the family but i'm not savvy to this stuff myself. I was planning on financing the building of some FPGA boards but i'm finding it hard to get accurate figures. Hence why I need a dev board so I can just find out for myself.
It doesn't include an ISE LE license though, so unless you already own one (I certainly don't) you won't be a happy customer.
Thanks for that, looks like a perfect dev board.
What do those licenses cost?
Where do I get an ISE license? From xilinx directly? Avnet?