Ninjastic
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Board Mining (Altcoins)
Re: Acorn M.2 FPGA based GPU Accelerator
by
ZedZedNova
on 27/06/2018, 06:14:33 UTC
Quote from: grendel25 on June 27, 2018, 05:42:59 AM
Quote from: ZedZedNova on June 27, 2018, 05:08:30 AM
Quote from: grendel25 on June 26, 2018, 10:25:32 PM
mineority.io/product/fpga  I know the acorn is a different product.  The point is that the two are VERY connected.  

-- snip --


Nice summary grendel25.

From what I can tell by lurking on the FPGA discord channel:
  • FPGA.land is GPUHoarder's endeavor, and he negotiated a deal with Xilinx to buy 5,000 of their VCU1525 dev boards.
  • mineority.io and FPGA.land are collaborating, with mineority.io buying 2,000 of the 5,000 boards from FPGA.land.
  • There will be mods made to the boards to improve mining performance, especially for better cooling and power, and because of the mods and also to reduce confusion, Xilinx has asked GPUHoarder/OhGodAGirl/whomever to change the name, and that's why you see BCU1525 references.
  • The price that you pay for the BCU1525 in fiat is US $3600 through FPGA.land, however they are sold out. The price you pay through mineority.io is also US $3600, but as grendel25 said, mineority.io takes all sorts of crypto, but not fiat.
  • Because FPGA.land and mineority.io are collaborating, I believe, if I understand correctly, that you can make an arrangement to pay in fiat to FPGA.land for a BCU to be delivered from mineority.io.
  • mineority.io is also offering hosting plans that range from 1-3 years long for an additional sum.
  • If you host the BCU1525 with mineority.io you are supposed to have access to their proprietary bitstreams.
  • If you host with mineority.io they also extend the warranty out to the length of time that you host with them.
  • The Acorn is a GPUHoarder design and sold through squirrelsresearch.com, another website run by GPUHoarder.
  • mineority.io is not offering the Acorn, yet. I would be surprised if the Acorn didn't appear in an offering from mineority.io eventually.
  • bitstreams for the Acorn will be provided by or through GPUHoarder.
  • The Acorn will have an API that mining programs can take advantage of if they are updated to do so. It is unclear which, if any miner devs (z-enemy, dust, ewbf, etc.), have been given the required info and/or pre-seeded with working prototypes to allow Acorn integration to be incorporated into their miners.
  • GPUHoarder's team is going to produce a miner.
  • No definitive list of what algorithms will be supported yet.
  • No definitive collection of performance data with regards to GPUs, motherboards, and algorithms. GPUHoarder has said that he, or his minions, are collecting that data and will release it all at the same time. On the discord channel GPUHoarder has been collecting a number of different motherboards and has taken suggestions/requests for specific boards. I imagine that GPUHoarder has, or has access to, a broad selection of GPUs to test. I have not seen any requests for GPUs to be tested.

for what it's worth, these same questions come up all the time in the discord channel. GPUHoarder and OhGodAGirl are fairly active, as are a number of other bitstream devs.

[ edited to add "power" to the third bullet point so it reads "better cooling and power" ]


Thank you and nice summary by you as well.  There is really a lot going on here.  In November 2017 I was telling anyone that asked me about crypto (I'm like the office expert... ha) that there would be BIG changes in mining.  I was saying that because of all the Samsung rumors but given the way tech changes I'm not surprised we are all sitting here talking about tech that would replace a  GPU mining rig with 1 mining card.  

I guess a question that I have but I think I saw an answer to... this is in regards to bitstream costs.  I want to say there would be some reasonable fee.  OhGodaGirl said jokingly she would remove such fees lol... I just hope the fees are not too high.

It will be interesting to see these pools Kristy-Leigh is talking about.  If it does what they say... they will be rich... oh wait, they said ZERO mining fees on their pools.. idk lol.  Kristy-Leigh is either restoring civility and community to the crypto world or this is the most crewel joke in the world.  If BTC goes back over $20K this year, I'll blame Kristy-Leigh for it!  hehehe

From what I can tell, there are several folks who are writing code for bitstreams that will be free (for the community) and there will be some that charge a dev-fee. I thought I had seen 4% mentioned as a dev fee, but I don't know if that is accurate. I also know that the GPUHoarder bitstreams, and probably the mineority.io bitstreams, will need their secure shell and an eFuse (burned into the BCU1525) to decrypt the bitstreams. 4% may seem high, but in this case there are just 5,000 units, not the tens or hundreds of millions of units of GPUs out there.

I don't know too much about other available bitstreams for the VCU/BCU1525, but I have to imagine that there will be dev fees involved.

So if I had to guess, Kristy-Leigh and OhGodACompany make their money through sales and hosting of the various GPUs they offer to host. Since it appears that OhGodACompany also does development work for GPU based miners, vis-a-vis OhGodAnETHlargementPill (the 1080, 1080Ti, and Titan XP free one is a sample of their custom work), they make money by contracting out their coding skills to private entities. I am also sure that they have a bunch of GPU mining rigs that they use to (cough, cough) test (cough, cough) their code. Who knows, perhaps they are one of the few entities in the crypto world not driven purely by greed, and like you said, are trying to restore civility and community. Then again, maybe they are elevating the scam to levels that BFL could only dream of.  Wink  Time will tell.