Post
Topic
Board CPU/GPU Bitcoin mining hardware
Re: 1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500) — ButterflyLabs 3rd party testing for Dummies
by
freequant
on 11/12/2011, 06:52:05 UTC
The "small demo" was NOT a live demo, and I stated as much.

There are countless occurences of you and BFL referring to the test of 25 and then 30 Nov as "proper testing", "live test" "prerelease demo" and whatnot.
You clearly mentionned after the fact that 25 Nov wasn't a live test.
I have found no evidence of you telling anywhere that 30 Nov wasn't a live demo (appart from your quotation of yesteday, of course).
Anyway, whether the test of 30 Nov was to be called a "live test", a "prerelease demo" or "proper testing" or a "small demo" isn't the real problem.

The problem is that the test of 30 Nov was arguably meant to prove that the product of BFL was legit, and that no countrary statement has been made to moderate the original announcement.

As Inaba mentioned, we'll be bringing a live running unit to his data center tomorrow for a quick look and performance demonstration.  Since we're not at our final figures, he's agreed to simply confirm or deny if the unit is generally within the performance class expected.  I think rather than fuzzy numbers, everyone just wants to know if this unicorn is real.  Fair enough...  we expect to clarify that once and for all tomorrow afternoon.. We'll follow up with a more formal demo once we're finished.

BFL calls the test of 30 Nov the "pre-release demo" so let's keep this term to stop playing with the words.
The "pre-release demo" had for ambition to establish once and for all the their product is legit.
Following the announcement, you didn't comment to moderate the announcement of BFL or clarify the location or circumstances.

Hi Guys,

I'd like to remind everyone that the performance figures Inaba witnessed were on a tuned down debug unit and are not the final performance figures expected for delivery.  Nonetheless, Inaba has confirmed performance is in the class expected.  The reasons for demoing a tuned down unit were clearly stated to Inaba beforehand and to the forum in general.  That is that we are still in development.

The purpose of the pre-release demo was simply to answer the question of 'real' vs 'fake'.   I think most reasonable people would agree that has been resolved.  The next step is final performance and when we complete our dev tuning, you'll have those figures to comment on.  Til then, troll fest!  Smiley

Regards,
BFL

After the test, BFL confirm with triumph that the test was a success in establishing that their product is legit.
Again, you didn't comment to moderate the announcement of BFL.
Later posts show that you actually vouch for their conclusion.

But in either case, I feel that the test we conducted showed a POC that adequately demonstrates that at least the hardware does what it's designed to do
Here you are pretty affirmative about the fact the test demonstrates that their product is legit.

Well stable, the BFL unit is > 4x the hashrate than ztek and more than double ngzhang. Power draw is also more than double ngzhang (Dunno what ztek power draw is).  Even allowing for a 10% efficiency decrease for "real world" scenario vs the test data, the numbers still hold.
Again, this is pretty affirmative. You even go to the length of doing comparative marketing on behalf of BFL.

To summarize :

You knew that our requirement to establish that BFL's product is legit was to follow a certain number of constraints, including limitations on the location, hardware, network access and software build.
You acknowledged, and made a rigourous protocol that was covering all these requirements and commited to apply it for all the tests.
So you knew without any ambiguity that there was no way we could ever reach the conclusion "BFL's product is legit" without abiding to the rules that we had agreed on.

On 30th Nov, you and BFL announced a test that had all the appearance of a formal test, and aimed at no less than prove that BFL's product is legit.
But the test that you performed was not valid as it did not follow in any way the protocol that was agreed on.
At that point you knew that there was a flaw in the way the test had been executed, and that no evidence had been made.
Nonetheless on 1st Dec, you and BFL announced that the test was successful at establishing that BFL product is legit.

The least that can be said while remaining objective is that the way you reported about the testing so far has been extremely misleading.
I won't make any further assumptions here simply because I think there is no ground for making additional assumptions.