Honestly, the naysayers just shut up and go troll somewhere else.. its just like watching kids in a play ground arguing over which footballers wife can beat which other wives in a snooker final in an Olympic swimming pool filled with smarties whilst being on a diet.

Seriously get a frickin grip!

Just cos Avalon have shipped first, doesn't mean they are better, and just cos BFL haven'y shipped yet, doesn't mean its a scam.

If you don't like x then just shut up, if you don't like y, then shut up!
You should only be offering insightful and calm information and dialogue, not slinging crap about like pigs in a mud bath.


You lot are supposed to be professional miners, supposed to know what this fledgling industry is about from the technical to the economic side of things, you all act like kids arguing and counter arguing over something that's just only been born!! Geez... once they are both out and the figures have been tallied and facts counted then you can start comparing, that's the adult thing to do.

I read these forums everyday, and everyday i feel more and more its a struggle to sift the wheat from the chaft.

I'm almost ashamed to say i respect some of your opinions and your technical prowess when you start acting like kids in the play ground.

I have an order with BFL, i don't care it might take a while to get it, i feel its the superior product that fits my needs, but i don't involve myself in the arguments one way or another as im only interested in the development, factual data about the development, and valued opinions from you guys on its eventual direction, which is becoming scarce.

Please for the sake of the community, please stop this needless and self destructive bickering.

Ok, Thanks for this.. that makes the situation much clearer.

Does anyone know what the generations path is for Asic Design... Kinda crystal ball really... but does anyone in the know, know what or able to estimate what the likely outcome is going to be regarding the FAB time for the current ASIC chips? i mean, is there any forward info on which chips are in design which are in planning... etc.. like the spartan family..

Hi all,

I've not been around on the scene much this past year, so I've been catching up on the current news and trends.
I'm glad to see the ASIC's dream is almost realized that make much more sense that churning through ATI cards...

So I've been checking the suppliers out... and unlike the GPU wars... this is heating up a little more on the design front than I've ever imagined it would.

I've looked through the main options and it seems to me that technical / power wise... the BFL SC single comes out tops ( please don't flame me if im wrong... im still switching from card based thoughts to self contained units )

So i need some opinions from you more experienced guys and gals:

Does anyone have like an up to date comparison table for pwr Vs. GH/s on the respective competitors like this?

http://organofcorti.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/92-asic-choices-update-2nd-november.html


I could imagine some sort of league table.. fantasy football style going with these guys now and seeing who trumps who and who can make that all important come back. It does seem that there have been a few teething issues, and for those of us who are less technical than the designers themselves would benefit from some ASIC comentator on the upcoming ASIC race


I really like the idea of having the coffee cup warmers...  on a few powered USB hubs being controlled by my Raspberry PI's, does anyone have any thermal details on these puppies? I can't imaging max 5v really pushing the heat out.. maybe long term the would bu nothing like a 400w psu would do.

Also.. can anyone answer why the other ASIC designers are spec'ing such high power supplies on their offerings? is this to cater for future cluster scaling ?

Cheers

Rock

I wanna know how you can put go faster stripes and an aerofoil on the back

Well, where i work our telephone numbers are pretty consistent, to the point where you can tell if someone is war dialling on a cold call campaign as they just go from one number to another with the same old banter...just had a call from a woman in India saying that their records indicate that someone has had an accident on this number... After having the phone slammed down on her about 10 times, she probably thought she hit the jackpot with me...

I said "yes, that's correct, i work at the Springfield Nuclear power facility and i had a small incident two months ago"
She said "And the nature of the accident?"
I said "Accidental exposure to illudium PU-36, its a radiological element essential in modulator work"  ( that's a reference to Marvin the Martian )
She said "And did you file a claim?"
I said "No claim filed as yet, im awaiting the medical report from Dr Feelgood, my private physician"
She Asks "what's the nature of the ailment?"
I said " well, i tend to glow a bit in the evenings, especially after a shower with radox shower gel, we use this for decontamination after work, and as i groom myself, i find hairballs growing in the strangest of places, i'm told this isn't normal. The other thing is that, i can also now see behind myself owing to the third eye that has recently started to grown on the rearward facing side of my head, something our my family lawyer says should get about $40 million in compensation alone, there are other things, but i don't want to upset you by describing them.
She said "ok, would you like us to proceed with claim on your behalf? it won't take long to start this"
I said "Yes, i think i would, what details do you need?"

They then went on to ask name, age, address, and other details which i happily supplied with a knowing grin as i was surfing a Warner Bros web page for inspiration..

She then said that owing to the large sum of potential compensation, that she would have to refer this to her manager who would want to most likely assign a team of specialists to assist me. lol

I gotta say, i really brightened up a boring afternoon

great... thanks a lot mate

I know there must be one around that compares the various families... like for example Intel
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm

does have anyone have anything like this for the current FPGA type chips currently on the market ?

Updated

Updated

Ordered mine Monday and there was a 54 day lead time....

Cheers Seven, that does change the stats a hell of a lot now.... seriously, that gives the x6000 series a bigger wedge to apply...

Cheers mate, i had previously seen this guy, and was looking through his posts and comparing his offerings with the rest...
now updated

So... the whole FPGA thing is now really biting me......

surfing around, looking at designs ( not that i know a thing about it ) i am slowly starting to understand implications.

So this post is for supplementary information that i find... in the hop that some FPGA dev's might find this useful.

http://www.hdl.co.jp/en/spc/lib/php/liblist.php/XIN.html
Whole load of FPGA circuit diagrams and other odds and sodds.

http://www.opalkelly.com/products/
Some nice Spartan Dev Boards

So, being a miner of small repute, mainly cos i like to play with old hardware and fit it to a new purpose, and i also hate to throw something away if i can use it for something else....I've been following this FPGA trend closely as it's pretty interesting what folks are up to..

So much information is out all over the place so i thought I'd condense it down purely for my own needs, but you guys can use it also.

General Comparison site :
http://bitcoinfpga.com/

General FPGA Performance Analysis
http://www.wikifpga.com/index.php?title=Performance_Analysis   ( if anyone has something more up to date.. please let me know )


Butterflylabs Single
http://www.butterflylabs.com/product-details/
Raw performance: 832 Mega Hash / second  (+/- 10% running variance)
Power consumption: 80w at load
Cost: $599 + Shipping


ZTEX
http://www.ztex.de/btcminer/
http://stores.ebay.de/ZTEX-Shop/   
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49180.0
1.15x Version Board
Cost: 309.51EUR + Shipping
205~215MH/s @ approx 9.4W


FPGA Miner
http://cablesaurus.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=10

Dual FPGA X6500 Mining Card
Avg. hashrate: 400 MH/s Max. power draw: 20W
Cost: $580.00 + Shipping

FPGA X6000 Mining Card ( DISCONTINUED )
X6000 200 MH/s @ 10 W
Cost: $390 + Shipping

FPGA development board "Icarus"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51371
ngzhang
Technology: Spartan6 -LX150 -2I (or -3C)
speed (MH/s): 380
$: 569 (1) / 469$ (multiple of 30) (-5$ if you do not need the adapter, recommend for bulk orders, they are heavy)
W: 4.5 for idle / 19.5 for full load. (notice this is the on wall power, include the adapter losses)



There are others... but I've limited it to these as they are probably the most serious players in the market to date.

So this is just some info scanned from the various forums and such into one place. I'm been looking at other FPGA set-ups, and whilst they all look pretty intriguing, I'm no where near closer to figuring out which one look the best in terms of economics.

From the comparisons, and from the set-up cost, per unit, vs eventual power usage I'm kinda leaning towards the ztex boards as they offer the best power conversion rate to btc. The best thing i like about this is the lower power consumption requirements, which might fit neatly into my Solar experiments I'm going to start in the summer.

I think, in terms of space taking motherboards, psu, graph cards, worrying about the heat generation, noise levels, safety concerns, power usage, the FPGA does have the ability to clear my entire spare room of junk boards currently grinding away to earn a pittance....
if i think real hard ( which is a rare event ) i'm pretty sure that after all the 5870/6790/6990 setups, planning, tubing for vents, extractors, ice trays, kitty litter trays and weird 2am confabs... a small fpga miner means i can have my spare room back....

trouble is... at roughly 400euro a pop its not a cheap alternative... but the power savings over my own rigs would in the long run save me power and increase btc profits... but they aren't all that resalable after im done with it......yeah, i know.. there's always resale value in ati cards.. but seriously... once im done with mining... i'll just start tinkering with something else that will end up costing me money, time, and patience lol

So i've also done some research into China for FPGA setups... i found a few that have ready made FPGA Spartan6 board with USB.... thing is, i haven't found out yet if a i need some jtag conversion box to talk to them yet.. ( im a FPGA n00b ) so the search is on.. .i suspect at some point, in china somewhere in Shenzhen a plan will be released to make them available en mass... when that happens... i suspect difficulty will rise 10 fold 6 months after that. Then im probably going to be looking for a new tinkering hobby.


Comments, flames, buckets of water all welcome... but please refrain from throwing rotten fruit.... aim it towards my biomass generator please.

Salt 'O' the rock

interesting...

so assuming 14MH/s

to get anywhere near a 6970 in terms of raw MH/s power even at a conservative guestimate.... your probably looking at at least 25-50 of these units all hashing away at around 14MH/s to the same pool under a single account to get near say 600MH/s ( 42 rasberries )

Obviously really inefficient but would look really neat in a rack with loads of these things hooked up... sort of backwards retro

Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
256MB RAM
Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
HDMI socket
USB 2.0 socket
RCA video socket
SD card socket
Powered from microUSB socket
3.5mm audio out jack
Header footprint for camera connection
Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm

this is taken from RS components site...

Where it says GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure you'll have to excuse my ignorance here, FPGA stuff is like an alien world to me,  but isn't 24GFLOPs a rather large number..... can anyone compare this to say a 6970? GFLOPs for GFLOPs

Hi,

Im trying to get this running in my test environment and im having a mare.. not being a linux bod in any shape or form, i can move about inside the system ok.

is there a specific make command for this?
i've can the ./configure and found i needs yasm, so i got that installed, but there dosn't seem to be a way i can see of getting this made to an install package... im a windows bod mostly so be gentle

thats a really spanking concept

To turn the heat by product into something else.
in winter it's not so bad as you could duct the hot air back into your house and warm via convection, summer is a real b!tch though.
I know that my own little setup currently makes my room feel like a dry sauna, so im looking forward to reduced heating bills in the winter

cool.. i thought as much....  nice to get a confirmation

hi all,

question:

does it matter for a mining card to have 1gb or 2gb ram? i assume as were underclocking ram, we're not that interested in the usage of the ram.... more pushing calculations directly into and out of the GPU's so if i got a 5830 with say 512MB ( don't ask ) it would really matter as it's gpu operations im looking at.

Am i right in thinking this?