Pages:
Author

Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500) — Butterflylabs, is it for real? (Part 2) - page 11. (Read 146880 times)

sr. member
Activity: 461
Merit: 251
Wait, the first pre-order was made in November?  So you've only been delayed a month or two?  I don't think that's that horrible, especially if they catch up and deliver a good product.

The first pre-orders were reportedly made some time before Oct 18...and even then the promised shipping was in 4-6 weeks from purchase date.
legendary
Activity: 2086
Merit: 1031
Video of the device?  What do you want the video to show?  A box with a red light? heh


Even though it could be doctored, maybe a video of the box hooked up to a computer with a display on the screen of mhash/s.

Also, a walk through from opening the box, hooking it up and getting the software running.

I realize that's a lot to ask, but it's certainly something I'd be watching right now if it was available. Smiley

that would not be too long to ask.  what would it take?  like 5 min?

We don't need an Inaba unboxing, we need a shipped device, tracking number anyone?, and an unboxing video from a customer (someone who has an actual production unit).

We also need some kind of communication from BFL.

I suggest you wait 4-6 weeks Wink

They are waiting for Nvidia Kepler to be released before they ship these unicorns out.

Long con surely. STILL, nobody has a shipping number. Remeber 4-6 weeks last year in November Grin ?

Wait, the first pre-order was made in November?  So you've only been delayed a month or two?  I don't think that's that horrible, especially if they catch up and deliver a good product.

The lack of communication isn't great.  I sent another e-mail last night trying to see if they have any planning for future deliveries.  No response yet, but I'm ok with a 24 hour response time.

Their previous response time was within an hour!
legendary
Activity: 2086
Merit: 1031
Video of the device?  What do you want the video to show?  A box with a red light? heh


Even though it could be doctored, maybe a video of the box hooked up to a computer with a display on the screen of mhash/s.

Also, a walk through from opening the box, hooking it up and getting the software running.

I realize that's a lot to ask, but it's certainly something I'd be watching right now if it was available. Smiley

that would not be too long to ask.  what would it take?  like 5 min?

I'm no producer, but I wouldn't be surprised if making a video (editing it & making it worth putting your name on) took a good 8-20 hours for a good 5 minute video.

Sure someone could throw the first 5 minutes of themselves onto the internet, but that's "a lot to ask" if the person doesn't want crappy quality videos of themselves online.

So either way, it's a lot to ask...
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Video of the device?  What do you want the video to show?  A box with a red light? heh


Even though it could be doctored, maybe a video of the box hooked up to a computer with a display on the screen of mhash/s.

Also, a walk through from opening the box, hooking it up and getting the software running.

I realize that's a lot to ask, but it's certainly something I'd be watching right now if it was available. Smiley

that would not be too long to ask.  what would it take?  like 5 min?

We don't need an Inaba unboxing, we need a shipped device, tracking number anyone?, and an unboxing video from a customer (someone who has an actual production unit).

We also need some kind of communication from BFL.

I suggest you wait 4-6 weeks Wink

They are waiting for Nvidia Kepler to be released before they ship these unicorns out.

Long con surely. STILL, nobody has a shipping number. Remeber 4-6 weeks last year in November Grin ?
hero member
Activity: 616
Merit: 500
Portland Bitcoin Group Organizer
Video of the device?  What do you want the video to show?  A box with a red light? heh


Even though it could be doctored, maybe a video of the box hooked up to a computer with a display on the screen of mhash/s.

Also, a walk through from opening the box, hooking it up and getting the software running.

I realize that's a lot to ask, but it's certainly something I'd be watching right now if it was available. Smiley

that would not be too long to ask.  what would it take?  like 5 min?

We don't need an Inaba unboxing, we need a shipped device, tracking number anyone?, and an unboxing video from a customer (someone who has an actual production unit).

We also need some kind of communication from BFL.
legendary
Activity: 1764
Merit: 1002
Video of the device?  What do you want the video to show?  A box with a red light? heh


Even though it could be doctored, maybe a video of the box hooked up to a computer with a display on the screen of mhash/s.

Also, a walk through from opening the box, hooking it up and getting the software running.

I realize that's a lot to ask, but it's certainly something I'd be watching right now if it was available. Smiley

that would not be too long to ask.  what would it take?  like 5 min?
legendary
Activity: 2128
Merit: 1065
That would significantly reduce efficiency not boost it.  Skipping nonces means you would on average find half the shares per getwork.
You gain nothing from not checking all nonce values.
Thank you very much for your explanations, gentlemen. I misunderstood the definition of efficiency.
I now understand that this parameter isn't that important and pools are mostly interested in it in a statistical average way.
legendary
Activity: 4466
Merit: 1798
Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
Icarus is for sale, he is on batch 3... i don't know if I am helping or even if this is what you are talking about...

i have a bounty for the first person to get a BFL single and that has not been claimed yet.


also ill pay 5 BTC to anyone who full helps me understand why this things gets 500% eff when my 7970 only gets 99%...

ill pay much much much more to get my 7970 at 500%
Run cgminer on EMC (with -g 1 and probably -I 11) - how much more will you now pay me over the 5 BTC I'm obviously not gonna get Tongue
Edit: Oh yeah you need SDK 2.6 and -k poclbm (but I think the latest version works out it's a 7970 and uses poclbm anyway when you have SDK 2.6)

As stated already but I will repeat - Efficiency makes no difference to how much BTC you get.
It is just the number shares you return vs the number of getworks you do.
It still takes the same amount of time to generate each share.
It's good for the pool if you only ask for a getwork on average every 5 shares rather than every 1 share.
It may be good for you also if your miner is ever waiting for work to do (i.e. is running below it's normal hash rate) but that should be rare if ever.
legendary
Activity: 4466
Merit: 1798
Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
Quote
Icarus is for sale, he is on batch 3... i don't know if I am helping or even if this is what you are talking about...

Icarus specs:

speed (MH/s): 380
$: 569

Costs as much or more than BFL, gets half the hashrate.  So, I want to know where I can buy 235 MH/s @ 9w for $120... I'm waiting for that info, not the advertised Icarus specs.
...
$120?

Icarus IS tangible and Goat wasn't talking shit ... as you said.

I simply stated that the person I've been chatting with is getting roughly 235 MH/s at 9W.
(and he is getting that with cgminer ... modified for the Icarus - the code may end up in cgminer soon but you can find it on github)
The power cost per MHash is definitely WAY lower than a BFL (almost 1/3)
Someone else can work out if that really matters or not.

The person is getting 50~60 Icarus devices soon ... apparently.
legendary
Activity: 2086
Merit: 1031
Quote
Icarus is for sale, he is on batch 3... i don't know if I am helping or even if this is what you are talking about...

Icarus specs:

speed (MH/s): 380
$: 569

Costs as much or more than BFL, gets half the hashrate.  So, I want to know where I can buy 235 MH/s @ 9w for $120... I'm waiting for that info, not the advertised Icarus specs.

The 500% was explained by Kano, which was pretty much what I theorized.  Why is your 7970 not getting that? I dunno, I don't have one to test with, but I suspect it may have to do with the fact that you are using multiple threads on the 7970 and the BFL uses a single compute thread cranking at 832 MH/s, so it blasts through the entire work space at that speed, instead of splitting it between multiple workspaces.  Then it rolls the time and starts again, giving the efficiency seen. So when it's time to submit the work back, it's already rolled through 4 or so blocks on the single thread (and thus a single getwork), where your 7970 has rolled through 4 blocks on 4 threads with 4 getworks.

  

Agreed, Butterfly labs has the convenience of selling a nicely packaged pretty much "plug & play" option.

RPH has been building his own units for $1 per mhash and they have good voltage.  I think he's talking from experience rather than from theory...

And yes, the small time home grown solutions are charging a premium for their electrical efficiency they bring to the market place
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
What I wonder is the following: can a pool detect that the device is checking not an every number in the nonce range but instead every n-th number in the nonce range?

Instead of doing hashing for 0,1,...,4294967294,4294967295 it would hash only (say) 1,3,...,4294967293,4294967295 or some other similar scheme of skipping through the nonce range?

That would significantly reduce efficiency not boost it.  Skipping nonces means you would on average find half the shares per getwork.

Efficiency isn't that important.

ALL efficiency means is (# of shares per get work). 
5.0 efficiency means you find 5 shares per getwork request. 
1.0 efficiency means you find 1 share per getwork request. 
0.5 efficiency means you find 1 share per 2 getwork requests.

Without ntime rolling efficiency > 100% is impossible (on any hardware).  Pool operators like high efficiency (and botnets that don't use a proxy have horrible efficiency) because per GH/s or TH/s the pool server needs to do less work with high efficiency miners.
legendary
Activity: 4466
Merit: 1798
Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
i really wonder about that 500% efficiency, i'm thinking about making a bounty to anyone who tells me wtf that's all about.
What I wonder is the following: can a pool detect that the device is checking not an every number in the nonce range but instead every n-th number in the nonce range?

Instead of doing hashing for 0,1,...,4294967294,4294967295 it would hash only (say) 1,3,...,4294967293,4294967295 or some other similar scheme of skipping through the nonce range?
You gain nothing from not checking all nonce values.
However if you only check one nonce per getwork, you're gonne be doing a LOT of getworks so slowing down your hash rate in a big way Smiley

The reality of it is that, with a standard 1 difficulty share pool, on average you will find 1 share per 2^32 nonces you check.
Skipping them makes no difference.
... and before anyone comes up with the stupid idea of stopping the nonce counter when they find a share, makes no difference either.
A nonce range can have no shares or could even have 2^32 shares.
It's all random statistics.

For those having difficulty understanding - consider this:
Say you have a coin and want heads when you flip it.
Once you flip heads you can either ignore the next one or include the next one.
Either way will make no difference to how many heads you are expected to find per the number of times you flip the coin.

The well known definition is actually Gambler's Fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_Fallacy
Just coz you find an answer in a truly random event, it will not effect the next time you will find an answer.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
Yeah, I have it set to 1 minute if I recall. I will have to look.  

The BFL device uses 1 thread, not 2.  If you look at the pictures of the screen (29?), you'll see there's only one thread cranking both chips.  I'm not an FPGA expert, so I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but it seems to me that the workspace is being split evenly between the two FPGAs, thus you are getting the full 832 MH/s on a single nonce range.

BTW - efficiency seem to have stabilized at 480%.  U: 10.28/m

The Icarus board with two Spartan6-150 does the very same thing. Splits the search space between two FPGAs. No big surprise here.
legendary
Activity: 2128
Merit: 1065
i really wonder about that 500% efficiency, i'm thinking about making a bounty to anyone who tells me wtf that's all about.
What I wonder is the following: can a pool detect that the device is checking not an every number in the nonce range but instead every n-th number in the nonce range?

Instead of doing hashing for 0,1,...,4294967294,4294967295 it would hash only (say) 1,3,...,4294967293,4294967295 or some other similar scheme of skipping through the nonce range?
full member
Activity: 154
Merit: 101
Bitcoin!
also ill pay 5 BTC to anyone who full helps me understand why this things gets 500% eff when my 7970 only gets 99%...
kano already explained it above.  It has to do with your mining software and the pool you're using, NOT the hardware you're using.  Now send him his 5 BTC. Smiley
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
Yeah, I have it set to 1 minute if I recall. I will have to look.  

The BFL device uses 1 thread, not 2.  If you look at the pictures of the screen (29?), you'll see there's only one thread cranking both chips.  I'm not an FPGA expert, so I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but it seems to me that the workspace is being split evenly between the two FPGAs, thus you are getting the full 832 MH/s on a single nonce range.

BTW - efficiency seem to have stabilized at 480%.  U: 10.28/m
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
i should have been more clear. i mean why can the two chips do it and my 7970s cant.
Your miner must implement rollntime and so also must your pool.
Both or it doesn't happen.

cgminer does Tongue

Edit: or look at it this way:
It has nothing to do with your 7970 vs the BFL FPGA.

Inaba was using cgminer on his pool.
That means his pool allows rollntime (and cgminer of course does also)

ckolivas has his 7970 doing 717 Mh/s with cgminer ... ... ...

But how 500%?  I have never seen cgminer show 500% efficiency for anything.

Note: I am not saying 500% is amazing, awesome, or does anything useful for the end user it is just "interesting".

To complete 5 nonce ranges would require 2^32 * 5 = 21 billion hashes.  Even at 1 GH/s that is 21 seconds.  That is a very long n-time-rolling period.  At 700 MH/s it is 30 seconds.


yeah, it does not sink in with me either, i was just willing to accept i was stupid and move on... glad you jumped in on this...

I edited my post.  I suspect it is that Inaba pool has a very high ntime rolling expire time.  Technically you can use any time but most pools seem to use relatively short expire time (say 10 seconds or so).  If inaba pool has a 60 second expire time the math would make sense.

@ 800 MH/s each chip is running @ 400 MH/s.  Since the miner is using 1 thread per chip (not sure if that is intentional, accidental, or it doesn't matter) that means 400 MH/s per thread (which is what matters for efficiency).  
500% efficiency = 5 shares / getwork = 21 billion hashes per getwork.  @ 400 MH/s per thread to acheive 500% efficiency would require the miner to work on a single block header for ~52.5 seconds.    It is unusual for a pool to have an ntime-rolling expire that high but I don't see why you couldn't.  

On a GPU rig you are going to have multiple GPUs and each GPU likely has 2+ threads.  Thus for "efficiency" (shares per getwork) what matters is the per thread hashrate.   A 5970 running at 750MH/s is 375 MH/s per GPU.  Using 2 threads it is ~187 MH/s per thread.  Lets pretend Inaba pool does allow an average ntime rolling of 52.5 seconds.  A 5970 due to work being spread over 4 threads would "only" have (0.1875 GH/s * 52.5 seconds / 4.2 billion hashes per share)  234% efficiency.

Maybe I will point one of my 5970s at Inaba pool to test out my hypothesis.  Honestly I don't know why more pools don't use a higher n-time rolling expire time.  It would cut down on the # of getworks which need to be sent per GH/s especially for faster miners.
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
i should have been more clear. i mean why can the two chips do it and my 7970s cant.
Your miner must implement rollntime and so also must your pool.
Both or it doesn't happen.

cgminer does Tongue

Edit: or look at it this way:
It has nothing to do with your 7970 vs the BFL FPGA.

Inaba was using cgminer on his pool.
That means his pool allows rollntime (and cgminer of course does also)

ckolivas has his 7970 doing 717 Mh/s with cgminer ... ... ...

But how 500%?  I have never seen cgminer show 500% efficiency for anything.

Note: I am not saying 500% is amazing, awesome, or does anything useful for the end user it is just "interesting".

To complete 5 nonce ranges would require 2^32 * 5 = 21 billion hashes.  Even at 1 GH/s that is 21 seconds.  That is a very long n-time-rolling period.  At 700 MH/s it is 30 seconds.

On edit:  Ah single thread vs multiple threads.  Smiley  Yeah a 7970 would be using 4+ threads so to acheive 50% efficiency would require each thread to complete ~21 billion hashes before the n-time-rolling expires.  650MH/s / 4 = 162 MH per thread.  At only 162 MH/s each thread would need the n-time-rolling expire time to be 132 seconds.

Thanks Inaba it was the single thread vs multi-thread which wasn't clicking.  To acheive high efficiency (which BTW really only helps pool operators Smiley you need:
a) a large per chip hashrate
b) single threaded miner (or single thread per chip)
c) ntime rolling support (both pool & miner)
c) a long n-time rolling expire time

Inaba just curious what is your pool's ntime rolling expire time?  It would have to be almost a minute right?  Most pools have much shorter ntime rolling expire time thus 500% efficiency is never possible (well not unless you have a 2GH/s per chip miner Smiley.
legendary
Activity: 1260
Merit: 1000
Quote
Icarus is for sale, he is on batch 3... i don't know if I am helping or even if this is what you are talking about...

Icarus specs:

speed (MH/s): 380
$: 569

Costs as much or more than BFL, gets half the hashrate.  So, I want to know where I can buy 235 MH/s @ 9w for $120... I'm waiting for that info, not the advertised Icarus specs.

The 500% was explained by Kano, which was pretty much what I theorized.  Why is your 7970 not getting that? I dunno, I don't have one to test with, but I suspect it may have to do with the fact that you are using multiple threads on the 7970 and the BFL uses a single compute thread cranking at 832 MH/s, so it blasts through the entire work space at that speed, instead of splitting it between multiple workspaces.  Then it rolls the time and starts again, giving the efficiency seen. So when it's time to submit the work back, it's already rolled through 4 or so blocks on the single thread (and thus a single getwork), where your 7970 has rolled through 4 blocks on 4 threads with 4 getworks.

  
legendary
Activity: 1358
Merit: 1002
So where do I buy it?

You don't! You only get to read the mofo's brag about how good they all are.
Pages:
Jump to: