Post
Topic
Board Hardware
Re: Nanominer Announcement
by
wondermine
on 12/03/2012, 12:55:12 UTC
I'm quite sure that the Cyclone V will not be available for your project in the middle of the year.

I spoke with a distributor Friday, they're expecting late April, early May release of the Cyclone V.  However, these things change, or I may have been misinformed.  All that said, the philosophy stays the same: when the new set of chips come out, there will be either a performance bump or a price drop for us.  If the project is ready before the new chips come out, we'll start using one of the currently available candidate FPGAs and switch over later.  As stated in the initial post, this architecture supports upgraded chips via simple firmware updates.

You know (and granted I'm no expert) I've always wondered why don't fpga mining board designers just find the cheapest FPGA chip and slap a whole bunch of them on a PCB and cluster them. For example put 8 Cyclone IV chips on one board and get 600 Mh/s Smiley

Two important things there:
1) Making a PCB for 8 FPGAs forces people to buy in multiples of 8.  That's an expensive board.  Wouldn't you rather have the option of buying those 8 chips one at a time?
2) If you want to do the mass thing, you go ASIC, you don't buy 250K FPGAs.  When you pay for an FPGA you pay for a)performance and b)reprogrammabililty.  If you want a lot of them, and you don't need part b, you're going to save by making your own ASIC.  But that day has not come for bitcoin, not by a long shot.

Hope you can deliver. The price is definitely competitive.
It's my mission over the next while to prove we can.  I have the prototyping hardware at my disposal, so stay tuned.