Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $500 — Butterflylabs, is it a scam? - page 24. (Read 123112 times)

I don't know where you got the idea I claimed they wouldn't get a test run of any product they buy.  No need to put words in my mouth.  A single wafer run is possible but the costs are much higher meaning those chips are really designed for testing. Still the cost per chips of the first batch is immaterial to the discussion so I am not sure why you brought it up.



All the chip work would be done by Altera in fab.  Assembly of PCB is trivial.  Why would someone do the tedious, expensive, and error prone work of hand assembly when you could drop it to an assembly house and get it assembled, xrayed, tested, and shipped in 2-4 weeks at lower cost and less time than you could with hand assembly?  Board #1 and Board #100 would be done at roughly the same time and shipped together.

Obviously. But I dont think assembly is the issue here. Contrary to D&T, Im convinced no matter if you have to order 1000+ or 10k s-asics that you will first receive a single wafer, or at most a single wafer run (usually 4 wafers) for testing, characterization, to validate your PCB etc. The biggest cost is the mask set; once you have that, you'd pretty much pay standard wafer price, but that still isnt cheap for 100+ wafers, so it doesnt make sense to bake 100s of wafers before being able to test and validate your first chip. Particularly since you wouldnt be ready to sell your product; thats not specific to BFL, anyone would have to test and debug their prototypes first. Its not good business to sit on 1000 processed wafers for all that time.

In short; my guess is BFL have ~100 chips now from a test run, possibly they are assembling them on boards themselves, and it will take at least 8 or so weeks from the green light before they receive the first of the volume production wafers (then there is wafer and/or chip testing, cutting, packaging, mounting etc) which they would probably have someone assemble on the PCBs elsewhere.

As for financing; Im sure they have had to pay Altera (or whomever) a considerable amount already, but you usually dont pay 100% up front either. It probably boils down to them having paid for the mask set and the test wafers, but not the volume production yet. Either way, they will have bills to pay and its good to be able to show investors initial revenue sooner rather than later.

  Inaba, are you going to have the tech available with you to report 'live' on your findings?

1 hour and 40 minutes to go. 100 minutes folks. I am prepared and ready for my socks to be blown off by this magical device. It's like the second coming of Jesus a month before ! Oh, the excitement.

So they are using an OEM box to house this instead of fabbing their own and THAT is what makes it fake? 

Seriously?  That's your position?

http://www.oemexport.com/free_shipping.html?display=3
scroll down

and also

http://www.span.com/product_info.php?products_id=27289

@DeathAndTaxes: you seem to be making more assumptions than I am willing to go along with. Your logic is probably sound if all your assumptions are true. But what if they aren't?

I don't think they're assembling the boards by hand, I think they're having them produced for them by some Asian company. I think you mentioned yourself in this thread - or it might have been someone else - that this is quite doable. Are you saying that if I want to have 1000 boards produced by some Taiwanese company that I can't have 10 boards to begin with, to see what the standard is like?

In any case; they claim to have only a small number of test units, plus a number of pre-orders "in manufacture". So it certainly seems like they sticking to the story of first producing the pre-orders, then the rest:

(1)

@btc_artist: I think he's referring to this picture of the "Rig Box". It's been discussed to death in this thread already: it's an OEM design, any company can put anything that they want inside it.

Link to image?

yes its fake, the 2nd image is actually of a Raid enclosure.

I don't think you understand build cost is negligible compared to processor cost.  If these are SASICS they would need to prepay a run of 1,000 units (although 10K is more likely).  If they have already paid that cost the cost to have an assembly house build 1000 (or even just 100) boards is trivial.

It would cost a lot more to try and assemble 100 boards by hand (labor isn't free).  It would be very tedious work and any mistakes would render very expensive chips worthless.   Q/A would be very tough as many defects wouldn't be detected until after they are shipped. Nobody would do that.  It just doesn't make sense given how cheap you can have some PCB assembled either in country or in China.

Lets pretend this thing is real and has a production cost of $300 per unit.  It breaks down something like this:
PCB cost: $10
Processors: $250  (although I don't believe it is possible to get 4MH per $1)
Minor components: $30
Assembly cost: <$10  (100 units might be $10, dropping to <$2 for 10K units).

So to think they have everything but need to slowly build them delaying shipping would mean you they had the $260K or so run a batch of processors plus the other $40K for PCB creation and minor components and then for some reason they are missing the final $1000 it would cost to get the first 100 boards assembled properly by an automated assembly house.  Does that make sense?  If it were you wouldn't you simply put that on a credit card instead of spending hundreds of hours trying to hand assemble something which really should only be done via automation?

@P4man and DeathAndTaxes:
From what I've read in this thread it doesn't sound like they're many guys. I have the impression of there being two guys (and one QC ninja).
I can see the why they want to get some initial units out to customers before starting to build 1000 boards.

We agree that no large scale production is going to be hand-produced. But what about the pre-orders? Could they be waiting until after pre-orders to scale up production, hence the term "pre-order"? They mention funding to be a reason for pre-orders themselves, they might not be able to hand over the money required to produce 1000 boards yet. At least not until they have 1000 (or so) orders (at which point they could take a loan). Also, I know that if I wanted to produce 1000 boards, I'd want 10 or so produced first to make sure they function properly.

I have no outside individuals coming, but if anyone is local that wants to come along, I can probably accommodate 1 or two additional people.  BFL said they might have one or two additional people... I need to keep it small as my DC probably doesn't want a ton of people marching into one of the server rooms.

LOL. This purely smells of scam from a mile away. From what I heard that place is one of the shadiest places around town.

Chattanooga Unix Gnu and Linux User Group?

Any idea what that is about? What is chugalug?

Indeed, as much as I would like to get rid of those noisy space heaters, the only reason I bought in the first place is because even if BTC went to 0 I still have something in the end to play games on etc. With these ( I suppose only the professional miners will want them, while the amateurs keep using GPUs that are not really that scalable in comparison to BFL products ) you get almost 0 resale value. If BTC fails then you fail as well .

This is why I'm keeping my 5970s.

"Yes, the drivers are open source. Processing functions outside of sha256 are not supported."

Well I guess that kind of sucks. Good luck selling these after the hype / music is over. Might as well buy the damn coins then since the hardware can become just as useless just as soon if something else comes up etc.

Are other people also participating in this demo?  Or have there been other demos?  I just found this:

http://www.chugalug.org/widget/1739/BitForce%20product%20demo
http://www.chugalug.org/widget/1740/RE:%20BitForce%20product%20demo

There is always enough time