"Should be". When it materializes. Except the size of the coins based on those algorithms makes them a relatively risky proposition.
I had high hopes for this project purely for mining regularly forking cryptonight, but I guess that's far too lucrative to share.

But difficulty is only ever going to go up as newer and better hardware is continuously coming along, which means that short ROI always turns into long ROI, and long ROI turns into a never ROI.

Taking £15M in interest free loan and investing it in something with a reasonable yield sounds like a pretty good business model.


But these bitstreams could be used for testing by everyone using AWS as 1525 FPGAs are available there. It may not be profitable, and it may get people banned, but it would prove the concept definitively.
If these are ready, why have they not been made available?

Right, but if it takes 36 months to earn enough to cover the cost of the rig, that means that net profit after 3 years is the resale value of the rig. Apart from the brief period of the mining craze that saw gamers pay stupid money for older GPUs that weren't good for mining, that's probably about 25%. 25% over 3 years is not exactly a goldmine.

In crypto mining there is _only_ short term because if you haven't made your money back in the first few months you are in the long tail and will never break even.
For any algorithm that hasn't gone ASIC, residual hardware value is paramount. A previous generation GPU will still be worth something on the 2nd hand market to somebody looking to build a gaming rig.
What do you envisage an FPGA to be worth on the 2nd hand market when it is no longer clearly profitable for mining? How many FPGAs have been through ebay in the past year vs. how many GPUs?
IMO realistic residual value potential of an FPGA needs a long, hard look in the cold light of day.

The exact same FPGA cards are available in AWS, so it would be trivial to verify it all for one's self, but the end-to-end software stack to do so has not yet been made available.

And expecting people to buy rather expensive hardware without making available the software stack required for public peer review is... bold.

Right, but some of us don't want to sink $30K into hardware without being able to directly validate the existence and performance of the stack.

Can the CN7 bitstream and miner be acquired now for testing purposes?
The fpga.land page says that it is available. Does that mean it is available now, or that it will be availble in August? If now, how/where can it be acquired for testing?

And that is the problem - I don't see a VAT number box at any stage during the checkout process. I tried to PM you but I'm too new to the forum to be allowed to do so.

fpga.land appears to be down. :-(

This doesn't seem to happen. On the right hand side, I only get Subtotal, Shipping, Taxes.
At no step from Cart, Customer Information, Shipping Method, Payment Method is there a box to enter the VAT number.
At what step _should_ it be there?

Ethash is entirely memory bandwidth and latency limited. That is why OC-ing the GPU does nothing for performance and why reducing CAS on the VRAM and increasing the memory clock speed is where all the performance improvements lie. The only way you are going to improve on it is with faster memory. And 4GB of QDR2 SRAM, even if it were possible, would be prohibitively expensive.

This is why the only available ethash "ASIC" yields no power efficiency improvement over a 1070. You _might_ be able to improve on it with a custom ASIC with 4GB of eDRAM, but that kind of silicon would also be obscenely expensive to produce, even for the current big players like Bitmain and Baikal.

ECC certainly won't do any harm provided it's unbuffered ECC memory. Most server memory is "registered" ECC which is different and won't work with this card.

I missed that, but now having taken a closer look:
1) DAG used is < 1 GB
ETH has a DAG of 3GB at this time.
ETC has a DAG bigger than ETH.

2) It apears to be using ethminer in OpenCL mode.

There seem to be a lot of red flags in those few seconds of video.

And keccak. At least that is the publicly available ones.
There is nothing to say that many others don't exist, used by people who are mining with them under the radar.

Where do I put in the VAT number to avoid having VAT charged at source?

If the video isn't an outright fake, I'm going to hazard a guess on what is going on here. It is almost certainly doing a solo running benchmark run with 0 generation DAG, which fits into the card's UltraRAM.
You'll never achieve that kind of a number any other way. Even if you put in QDR2 SRAM modules in those DIMM slots it won't help you because IIRC you can only get 288MB worth of those in - far less than the 3GB+ you need for current DAG size for ethash based coins.

Will you be releasing the VHDL/Verilog for cryptonight v1 with the cards?
If not, when will you make cryptonight v7 available?

That doesn't follow at all, hence the GPU shortages. Increasing manufacturing capacity costs money. Having that capacity unused also costs money. GPU manufacturers decided to not increase capacity because the risk of mining demand dropping is too great. FPGAs are no different, except starting from a lower base, a drop in demand and dumping on eBay would result in even greater losses later on for the manufacturers.

That pie is a lot less finite than the amount you can scrape together to invest into your own hardware, though. The genius of it is that you effectively own the devfee % of the total hash rate.