Hi Iso.  Here is 1 group of 18 pulled out for flashing so that I didn't have to stand in the middle of those shelves, which was like standing in front of a pizza oven!  I hand built the molex connectors of PCI-E cables from the Seasonic 1250 gold PSUs, and you can see the up/down ribbon connectors between each pair of boards which I built myself as well.  I pulled off Enterpoint's top down fans and used side and back blowing fans so that the hot air would move away from the boards, and to reduce the stacking height.

I wish I had video of the whole thing running.  It is pretty cool with yellow leds every time a work unit is completed, greens when shares are found (about 15/s I think) and quick flashes for the IO operations.  But I could never get the lighting or perspective right.

6" vent fans for exhaust.  The big aluminum things are mufflers to cut down on the intake noise and then the boxes are full of packing peanuts to kill the fan noise.

The exhaust provides about 1kW cooling, and then the white box between the shelves is a 4kW portable AC unit (the biggest you can run off a 15A circuit)

It's too bad you don't understand the difference between truth telling and trolling.

Go read my post history and see what I told people last year.  

This is my last post on the subject because the fact is, you are trolling me!

This is the array of ~140 Cairnsmore CM1 boards I built last summer.  The last time I had all of them hashing on a single pool they were pumping out around 115 GH/s.  Power demand is 6.5 kW, not including cooling.  I've moved them to a better location for summer, which is why I'm comfortable posting now

When I saw Skyfall I laughed at the lame crypto gear the movie's villian had.  



I'd like to give a little shout out of thanks to all the folks at BFL and especially Inaba!  Without you this would never have been as profitable as it is today.  How you might ask?  Well:

• They took millions in preorder money that otherwise would have been spent on hashpower that exists and competes with me off the market for nearly a year now, and continue to do so today
• They scared lots of other folks away from making the investment I did, since it was obviously a money loser when they would ship in October
• They are so unbelievable incompetent, they still haven't shipped!  Meanwhile these babys are chunking out $600 / day
• When they finally do ship, their incompetence means they won't ship much and it will be many, many months before difficulty catches up with my electric bill

Feel free to ignore me. 

My post is on topic and my points about BFL here are as well.

Inaba has acted like a complete ass with me since long before he stopped pretending not to be a BFL employee and I have every right in the world to point out the facts are demonstrating I was right a year ago, and still am.

https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3029722,-60.3700759,1027m/data=!3m1!1e3

that's your operation right? 

Are you aware that your partner in Goose Bay has died?  People in town have been looking for someone to claim control of the assets.

Considering that Bitmain has dropped prices on new hardware over 75% in some cases, why would you imagine someone would finance your used gear at 50% of the new value?

Hashing hardware is essentially worthless after 24 months due to the technology cycle.

Once again posting a warning.

I scrapped around 100 machines, and the scrapyard is trying to sell them as working units on Ebay.

These boxes were run hard for years, and were unreliable from the start.  Few, if any of them, went to scrap fully functional.

The creditor committee was dissolved many years ago when Hashfast was put into receivership.  The trustee appointed by the judge has been the sole decision maker ever since, and the committee members get no more information than ordinary members of the creditor class.  The trustee settled with Cypherdoc long ago.

Hashfast is a dead dog and so is Icedrill

I think you need to figure out how much rent you can afford per kw.

Then figure out how much fan you need per kw too.

Mining at scale is tough.  it's a lot of capital in, and you are competing with garage miners with no overhead.

If you are signing a long term lease, look at whether you could survive another tough period like 2014-2015.  The odds are good that it is coming.

Good luck.

from the sketch you show, i am guessing this is a commercial condo structure with setup for office in front and warehouse in the back.

They only have 220V 200A service typically.  And it's not as simple as upgrading the panel.  You need new wires from the transformer, if the transformer has capacity (it probably doesn't).

You will be hard pressed to support the cooling requirements in a space like that.  Even if you have a climate that allows for only air cooling year round, 200 kw calls for around 30 000 CFM of air in an ideal situation (100% efficiency and separation between hot and cold)

Even running 20 kw in that kind of space would be challenging.

How many kW are you planning to draw?  It can be anything from easy to impossible depending on your answer.

Keep in mind that commercial leases require you to restore the building to original condition if the landlord wants.  Cutting holes can get pricey.  And leasehold improvement laws mean that any electrical work you do stays with the building.

For any scale that I find interesting these days this means buying the building.  Most upgrades to make a building suitable for serious mining will cost more than the property itself.

Do your fans run on good intentions? 

In the real world fans require power and that is part of the total demand that OP is asking about.

I know that very well.

The arrangement of transistor gates required to implement a double SHA-256 hash would not change.  The implement would change for the target process node and Fab.  

By demonstrating that your transistor level design is correct, the risk is dramatically reduced.  It's not zero because, as you say, the implementation at each node would require a unique design layout.

Would it really move the need on the costs to implement a bitcoin hash chip?  I can't say for certain.  I can tell you that a surface discussion with somebody exposed to semi design won't give you a valid answer because they are thinking in terms of tool chains and standard cells that decouple you from the transistor level by several layers.  It simply isn't industry standard practice.  But results delivered by Bitfury make it clear it's the only way to be competitive in the crypto mining space.

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Moderator's note: This post was edited by frodocooper to remove a nested quote.

It would take a lot more than that.  Form a 501(c), build a project and test plan and publish a budget.  Identify a qualified team that's committed to moving forward if the needed resources are available, and the key milestones where funds are needed.

With that it really wouldn't be hard to raise the funds.  Whether it's via angel investors for a start up, or a kickstarter approach with a public domain solution as the end point would be up to you.

That's the whole point of doing the transistor design as open hardware.  You eliminate the biggest barrier to entry by putting the transistor layout into the public domain.  There still would only be a handful of folks that would go to masks at 10 nm or lower nodes, but they would be forced to keep pricing competitive because there are dozens of entities capable of entering the market.

I am sure you could find faculty that would find this a worthwhile project, and you could easily fund a few spins at an 8 inch 64 nm fab for under $1M.  That's 50 BTC.  I paid that much as a bounty to fix my FPGA supplier's garbage code back in 2012!

Actually you want engineers with a balance if it's any sort of a team.  With full on cases they will only be effective with a strong manager who can command respect on a technical level.  There's an amusing article on medium from a few months back talking about an example of this; it was something like 'We fired out best programmer and it was the smartest thing I ever did'.

Semi design isn't my area of expertise.  But as an outsider I don't understand why it wouldn't be feasible to have the transistor level layout be done in a platform independent way.  The would then allow for design debug to be completed at a low cost node for less than $1 M, then you could focus on building at the expensive node with confidence there won't be a catastrophe.  If that approach is feasible I don't really see why the whole thing couldn't be done in an open source fashion.  An open sourced transistor layout for SHA-256 would seriously break open the whole competitive oligopoly that exists now.  There are plenty of folks with double digits millions from bitcoin at this point that would see the benefit, so fund raising should be feasible.

I don't think there's much promise in pursuing other algorithms.  Basically ether's algo is the only one without existing silicon and a chance to survive long term.  I guarantee you there are people working on it already.

 

So far the public intentions has been to offer mining gpus that don't have video outputs.  The sole purpose is to prevent miners from dumping their gpu gear onto the market used when the inevitable crash comes and they can't mine profitably.

Global Foundries operates on a standard contract fab model so it's not really surprising that they built the BFL devices.

I don't think the transistor level design requirement is that big of a barrier.  Bitfury did it by himself on a kitchen table over the course of a year.  The problem is you won't find a design house willing to work that way.  They have their tool sets and their work flows and they aren't going to diverge from it.  So you will need to buy your own set of design tools and find a team of borderline Asperger's cases to do the transistor design.  

Somebody should really fund a Professor to do the design work under an open hardware license.  One the transistor design for SHA256 is done you just have to bring that into the fab's design tools and optimize for placement.  Conductor losses are becoming dominant at these process nodes so that is where the biggest optimizations will be found.

I believe the Hashfast design ended up in the hands of their silicon integrator, which did the design work in the first place. Similarly, Terrahash went bankrupt, so their design IP ended up in play and is probably held by someone who assigns it a modest value.  BFL - I don't know what became of them at all, but they had a design.

The catch is that all of these designs were laid out using VHDL to standard cell libraries.

Bitfury clearly demonstrated that laying out at the transistor level gave massive advantage for power efficiency.  His 64 nm chip performed better than the 28 nm generation.  It was also buggy as hell.

I don't think it's feasible to deliver a power competitive design with standard cells.  You will need to start with transistor level design of an unrolled hashing core.  From there, it's likely there are power optimizations that are possible.  The design will likely need to be optimized thermally as well, to limit hot spots.

Delivering a working SHA256 hash core isn't all that hard.  Being competitive from a power efficiency standpoint will be difficult.  I doubt it's practical to expect you will be within 20% of Bitmain on a given node until your 3rd or 4th generation.

Good luck, but I think you will find your money would be better invested convincing a major player like AMD or NVIDIA to develop a solution.