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Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $500 — Butterflylabs, is it a scam? - page 33. (Read 123109 times)

rjk
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
1ngldh
EXACTLY, if they are managing to do what they claim, why are they aiming it at only the Bitcoin Community? An FPGA array of this power has more uses than bitcoin.

Re-read what BFL themselves posted. They stated that Bitcoin is NOT their primary objective.

Why would we go to the trouble for such a small market?  We didn't.  Our product design is influenced by other factors beyond hash mining.

Regards,
BFL
legendary
Activity: 2128
Merit: 1073
FPGAs are a poor choice for sCrypt mining for the same reason that GPUs are: they require too much on-chip cache.
This isn't that obvious to me. It seems like ArtForz choose suspiciously small value for the scratchpad size when parametrizing scrypt() for TeneBrix: 131583.

Converting that to bits gives me slightly over a megabit. This is well within the BlockRAM resources for the Xilinx chips that are currently popular among miners. It isn't out of the realm of possibilities why a custom microcoded implementation of ArtForz's scrypt() would be necessarily slower that on the common CPUs. The requiring mixing array should fit with the FPGA "cache". Here "cache" means it would not require going off the FPGA to an external RAM.

Besides, ArtForz is known to be crafty that way and has a very specific sense of humour.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
Ok so here is the email I received regarding info on the 54 GH/s box:


"The BitForce Rig Box product will cost about 80% of the per mh/s cost established with the pricing of the BitForce SHA256 Single.  The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 ( thought it was $500 LOL ) for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s), or roughly 60 cents per mh/s.  At 80%, the Rig Box comes in at roughly 50 cents per mh/s.  Although the technology is the same, clustering allows for additional efficiency opportunities which can't be realized in the stand alone single.TOTAL BS  Rig Boxes are about $25,000 The scam is not big enough for you BFL ? each with 54 gh/s performance.  They don't come in smaller flavors. Well obviously you do not want to scam for less - efficiency is king, even in scamming Smiley "


Take it as you will.


Don't know about you but this email above 99% convinces me this is a total scam.
Surely you can explain why you think this instead of simply calling them scammers.

And you guys wonder why BFL doesn't want to participate in this thread...

See pages one through thirty-two.
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 504
Decent Programmer to boot!
This is semi related to the thread and is awesome vintage pr0n none the less...

http://www.copacobana.org/gallery.html


I once tried to do what BFL is claiming to do now. Spent a lot of time looking into the maths. If BFL has what they say they have, they honestly should be selling it to the Government for millions...

EXACTLY, if they are managing to do what they claim, why are they aiming it at only the Bitcoin Community? An FPGA array of this power has more uses than bitcoin.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s)

Totally missed this the first time.  Under what math system is 1050 MH = 1.2 GH?

Guys, I think we have cracked it !!! BFL Labs come from another planet. They have managed to break the laws of physics and achieve 100% efficiency and use a completely different system of computation far superior to ours which yields greater Mhash/s than we ever dreamed. That explains ALL the problems with the different company names and all that. Bring on the $$$, bring on the pre-orders, bring on the fools : I am sold Tongue ! Hope they can keep the assembly line hot, because I want to buy 599 units of the magical device.
  
It really is damn clear : until they let Inaba in ( under NDA or something ), nobody should pre-order unless they want to lose money to some scammers. Might as well donate that money to me instead for charity Smiley
hero member
Activity: 504
Merit: 504
Decent Programmer to boot!
The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s)

Totally missed this the first time.  Under what math system is 1050 MH = 1.2 GH?

Mine, I like that idea, less is more.

Hey can anyone donate a BTC? By which I mean 1.142857 BTC. Thanks!
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s)

Totally missed this the first time.  Under what math system is 1050 MH = 1.2 GH?
full member
Activity: 180
Merit: 100
mistaken for gribble since 2011
Ok so here is the email I received regarding info on the 54 GH/s box:


"The BitForce Rig Box product will cost about 80% of the per mh/s cost established with the pricing of the BitForce SHA256 Single.  The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 ( thought it was $500 LOL ) for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s), or roughly 60 cents per mh/s.  At 80%, the Rig Box comes in at roughly 50 cents per mh/s.  Although the technology is the same, clustering allows for additional efficiency opportunities which can't be realized in the stand alone single.TOTAL BS  Rig Boxes are about $25,000 The scam is not big enough for you BFL ? each with 54 gh/s performance.  They don't come in smaller flavors. Well obviously you do not want to scam for less - efficiency is king, even in scamming Smiley "


Take it as you will.


Don't know about you but this email above 99% convinces me this is a total scam.
Surely you can explain why you think this instead of simply calling them scammers.

And you guys wonder why BFL doesn't want to participate in this thread...
sr. member
Activity: 349
Merit: 250
Ok so here is the email I received regarding info on the 54 GH/s box:


"The BitForce Rig Box product will cost about 80% of the per mh/s cost established with the pricing of the BitForce SHA256 Single.  The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 ( thought it was $500 LOL ) for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s), or roughly 60 cents per mh/s.  At 80%, the Rig Box comes in at roughly 50 cents per mh/s.  Although the technology is the same, clustering allows for additional efficiency opportunities which can't be realized in the stand alone single.TOTAL BS  Rig Boxes are about $25,000 The scam is not big enough for you BFL ? each with 54 gh/s performance.  They don't come in smaller flavors. Well obviously you do not want to scam for less - efficiency is king, even in scamming Smiley "


Take it as you will.


Don't know about you but this email above 99% convinces me this is a total scam.

So, no pre-order for you then?  Wink I mean, you admit a 1% chance it is NOT a scam.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Ok so here is the email I received regarding info on the 54 GH/s box:


"The BitForce Rig Box product will cost about 80% of the per mh/s cost established with the pricing of the BitForce SHA256 Single.  The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 ( thought it was $500 LOL ) for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s), or roughly 60 cents per mh/s.  At 80%, the Rig Box comes in at roughly 50 cents per mh/s.  Although the technology is the same, clustering allows for additional efficiency opportunities which can't be realized in the stand alone single.TOTAL BS  Rig Boxes are about $25,000 The scam is not big enough for you BFL ? each with 54 gh/s performance.  They don't come in smaller flavors. Well obviously you do not want to scam for less - efficiency is king, even in scamming Smiley "


Take it as you will.


Don't know about you but this email above 99% convinces me this is a total scam.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
I didnt misunderstand the article, for the most part, I totally did not understand it. Either my IQ is lower than my shoesize, or achieving high performance in hashing isnt quite as straightforward as you think it is. Ive read left and right that creating an asic front end to the fpga (for loop unrolling?) would make a lot of sense, and if thats the case here, its not hard to see where superlinear scaling could come from. A much faster asic.

That doesn't make any sense.  A single hash is incredibly fast.  Literally a millionths of a second or less to complete.  If you tried to have inter-chip communication between ASIC and FPGA that communication bus would be on the gigabit per second scale with nano-second latency.  While you may be able to build something like that given how trivial a single hash is to accomplish it serves no purpose.

The article you linked to had nothing to do with multi-chip designs.  I haven't seen any paper anywhere which involves multiple chip designs where each chip isn't independent of the other chips.

There is plenty of room even in the Spartan LX150 to completely unroll the loop INSIDE the FPGA.  There is no longer any looping invovled.  The SHA loop has been transformed into a flat process. Every clock cycle the FPGA completes all 80 loops (with a little cheating) involving both the inner and outer hash for Bitcoin.  There isn't anything else to unroll.  Nonce goes in, hash comes out on each tick of the clock.
Tick - hash
Tick - hash
Tick - hash
If a valid hash is found return it, otherwise keep going.
4 billion ticks later - nonce range is complete - request new data from controller.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
I didnt misunderstand the article, for the most part, I totally did not understand it. Either my IQ is lower than my shoesize, or achieving high performance in hashing isnt quite as straightforward as you think it is. Ive read left and right that creating an asic front end to the fpga (for loop unrolling?) would make a lot of sense, and if thats the case here, its not hard to see where superlinear scaling could come from. A much faster asic.

Anway, I dont know nearly enough about this to speculate, but I know enough to know I know nothing. And to some extent, that probably goes for the majority of posters here.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
So you are saying a 2 chip asymmetrical solution, like ASIC + FPGA is nonsensical? Have you read the PDF I linked above?

I think you misunderstood the article.  They aren't talking about increasing performance by using multiple chips but increasing the performance internal to a single chip.  If BF has a breakthrough in performance it wouldn't only occur in the 64 FGPA model but also in the 2 FPGA model as well.

The paper talks about using FPGA w/ onboard PowerPC microprocessor to aid the unrolled hashing engine.  While it is an interest concept the performance levels they got (1.4Gb/s) are not better than performance obtained by "garage FPGA programmers" and those FPGA w/ onboard PowerPC microprocessors are very expensive $1000+ each.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
So you are saying a 2 chip asymmetrical solution, like ASIC + FPGA is nonsensical? Have you read the PDF I linked above?
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
Does that make sense to you?

Do 32 GPU have 54x the performance of 1 GPU?

No idea how that applies to hashing, but I wouldnt rule out superlinear scaling just because its superlinear.

Of course you know how it applies to hashing.  The hashing problem is very easy.  Very simple.  On average GPU it takes less than a millionth of a second to solve.  Then the GPU just does it again and again and again (millions of times per second i.e. MH/s).  Each problem is completely independent of the prior problems.  There is no speed up from having GPUs "work together" and the problem requires negligible amount of RAM and bandwidth.

The problem scales perfectly linearly to ALUs and clock speed.   We have seen this on CPU, GPU, and FPGAs.   The reason is that while hashing may seen hard it is an illusion.  Even the weakest CPU miner can complete a hash in a nearly insignificant amount of time.  What makes hashing "difficult" is that a valid hash is so rare that is takes on average a 4 quadrillion attempts to find a valid hash. 

It isn't doing something hard.  It is doing something very easy, 4 quadrillion times.  You can't speed that up by having boards work together.  Each "problem" (hash attempt) is trivially easy.  It can't be made easier.
full member
Activity: 180
Merit: 100
mistaken for gribble since 2011
Quote
Still we will know in 2 weeks.  Although their website says 4-6 weeks just like it did 3 weeks ago so my guess is in 2 weeks pre-orders will be shipping in 4-6 weeks.

You know, having been involved in 2 startups,  I can imagine they have other things to do right now besides updating their website 3x per week and keeping a 30 page thread full of conspiracy theorists happy, considering they are only about to actually launch their first product.  It also makes complete sense they dont want to spill all the beans here yet. Cant blame them for wanting to build some anticipation for their official unveiling.

3x per week? Come on P4Man no need for hyperbole.  How about once a month?  How about changing the pre-order shipping timeframe one time since the website launched?  Not still saying 4-6 weeks? As far as startups did your startup manage to have the wrong company name on the website?  

Given they have updated the website a half dozen times it isn't beyond reason to think they might occasionally put the right company name and shipping date up there.
People like you won't be satisfied until they hand deliver the product gift wrapped with cherries on top and a hand written letter stating how awesome you are.

No one is forcing you to pre-order. Let us take the risk!
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
3x per week? Come on P4Man no need for hyperbole.  How about once a month?  How about changing the pre-order shipping timeframe one time since the website launched?  Not still saying 4-6 weeks?

4-6 weeks after ordering. That might still be fairly accurate if you order today.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Does that make sense to you?

Do 32 GPU have 54x the performance of 1 GPU?


Actually, at least in games, 2 GPU's can have more than 2x the performance of one. Because you dont only duplicate the processing resources, you also double things like RAM, and not everything has to be duplicated in RAM on each card, at least for games.  its the same idea that 4 GB of Ram is easily more than 4x faster than 1 GB ram if you can avoid swapping. It could be 100x faster or more. No idea how that applies to hashing, but I wouldnt rule out superlinear scaling just because its superlinear.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
Quote
Still we will know in 2 weeks.  Although their website says 4-6 weeks just like it did 3 weeks ago so my guess is in 2 weeks pre-orders will be shipping in 4-6 weeks.

You know, having been involved in 2 startups,  I can imagine they have other things to do right now besides updating their website 3x per week and keeping a 30 page thread full of conspiracy theorists happy, considering they are only about to actually launch their first product.  It also makes complete sense they dont want to spill all the beans here yet. Cant blame them for wanting to build some anticipation for their official unveiling.

3x per week? Come on P4Man no need for hyperbole.  How about once a month?  How about changing the pre-order shipping timeframe one time since the website launched?  Not still saying 4-6 weeks? As far as startups did your startup manage to have the wrong company name on the website?  

Given they have updated the website a half dozen times it isn't beyond reason to think they might occasionally put the right company name and shipping date up there.
full member
Activity: 180
Merit: 100
mistaken for gribble since 2011
Ok so here is the email I received regarding info on the 54 GH/s box:


"The BitForce Rig Box product will cost about 80% of the per mh/s cost established with the pricing of the BitForce SHA256 Single.  The standard post pre-order price of the Single is $599 for 1,050 mh/s (1.2 gh/s), or roughly 60 cents per mh/s.  At 80%, the Rig Box comes in at roughly 50 cents per mh/s.  Although the technology is the same, clustering allows for additional efficiency opportunities which can't be realized in the stand alone single.  Rig Boxes are about $25,000 each with 54 gh/s performance.  They don't come in smaller flavors."


Take it as you will.
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