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Re: Butterfly Labs - Bitforce Single and Rig Box
by
fitty
on 24/02/2012, 00:47:07 UTC
One of those people claims to have seen their operator with "tons" of singles all over the place. If they can really produce 20-40-80 a week, they're going to sell like hot cakes. The fact Icarus uses 50% less power isn't going to win a lot of people over. Power is cheap, power for FPGAs is very minor. Unless you're spending $15k-$50k the power savings isn't worth the farm being 50% slower. No one is going to pay the same amount of money to get something half as fast. People are running 500-800-1200 watt monsters, some people multiple gpu rigs, 80watts a pop per butterfly single is a fraction of what they likely use right now.

So I'd argue $600 for 832mhash for 80 watts does blow the other FPGAs out of the water. Now that we know they're at least shipping units, we're more pictures/proof coming over the next week I'm sure, they're going to get a lot of orders.

But it's likely they won't be able to keep up with demand and the other FPGAs will get bought and supported. But there's going to be quite a few disappearing because they just can't match the price/performance. Hopefully they keep pushing the improve but these butterfly singles are really impressive.

If the butterfly, X6500, ztex, icarus are all available to order, people are going to buy the butterfly single. The saving grace is the butterfly singles likely aren't available in a timely manner, but that can change. The other guys aren't likely to get twice as fast in the same time span it takes butterfly to get up to speed.

-has all the FPGA competition been wiped out with this weapon ?
Yeah, now that there are 2 whole units out there everyone else should pack it up and go home.