Quote from: jrose120 on December 22, 2014, 06:51:08 PM

I bet this development update is 2 months old. They just want you to think they don't have your miners.

I doubt it. I reckon this is brand new news.

Developing hardware and testing ASICs and tweaking firmware takes time, a lot of time. Most of the companies building miners have had their engineers pulling all-nighters and working through weekends to debug - mainly because the engineers are investors in the company. They're roughly on-track with what I expected given the date of delivery of the chips - maybe a bit slower, but when you outsource stuff, it tends to be slow.

There is no sign that they are mining. If they were, it would be obvious from network hashrate and difficulty.

From their update it sounds like they have literally just got this board working. One of the chips appears to be dead, and the others have malfunctioning cores. They talk about MBIST (memory built in self test) possibly, they have installed more than 128 kB of RAM on each core, so that they have some spare RAM on each core which can be swapped in, in case some of the RAM is faulty. Once they have fully tested all the chips, they may be able to "rescue" most of the cores, by swapping the memory around. However, if they're demoing a board which hasn't been fully memory mapped, then it suggests that it is literally the first time it has ever successfully booted up.

The whole thing all seems to fit with a very carefully, very conservatively engineered system: ASICs designed with powerful built-in self repair functions, likely with no clever tricks, just good-old reliable techniques. The PCB design is reasonable and uses high-end components. The problem is all this careful design takes time and costs money.

If you look back at the winning BTC mining designs - it is the radical designs, that one or 2 students knocked up as their first ever ASIC (this is the case with the Bitfury chip - it's a 1-man effort, their first ever ASIC - it's a crazy design, extreme risk, but they got lucky and it worked first time). Most of the other scrypt ASICs have been designed on the cheap - no clever redundancy and self-repair - just the basics, small die sizes and low cost manufacture - if the yield is low, you can just drop the chips in the trash. The alpha/KNC method of going for big ASICs at the bleeding edge, needs a lot more finesse, and a lot more design. KNC appear to have shipped some real turkeys. It will be interesting to see just how much longer alpha need, although the end does now appear in sight.

Edit - HAHA. Wow. I've just noticed the hand-soldered, sticky-tape'd down bodge chips on the PCB. Someone screwed up the PCB design. That's probably why it's taken 4 weeks to get the board to boot up, and explains why they've had to get a new PCB designed.

Test User

Posts

Merits