Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500) — Butterflylabs, is it for real? (Part 2) - page 63. (Read 146936 times)

That's the reason I'm asking? These insurance guys seem about as honest as bankers.  Once they have your money who knows?  What if they actually have to fulfill their contract?

Do they warranty random shit a dude builds in his garage?

Has anyone looked into the square trade warranty?  Is it possible to get the extended warranty for the BFL Single? $85 for three years is not bad if honored by square trade.

Agreed. This is why I said if they manage high reliability. That is something yet to be proven. Ten months to break-even is not a slam dunk, but it's about as good as you can expect right now even with the most cost-efficient tech (putting together an 850MHash/s PC will also break-even in the 10-month ballpark). I also voiced my disappointment of the 6 month warranty; honestly I was surprised to see it that low and I hope BFL reconsiders. And, of course, the PC is likely to have a higher resale value than the BitForce Single.

I think the bottom line is that, whatever these chips turn out to be, many of us in the community won't be convinced of the reliability of these units until a number of them have been in the field for 6-12 months and we have hard numbers about their failure rate during that period.

That's part of why the decision to buy these is a difficult one: Buy now, take a risk, and start mining while the reward is 50BTC/block ... or wait 6-12 months to get clear evidence of their real-world performance and reliability (removing much of the risk) before buying, but hitting the 25BTC/block changeover that much sooner. These units may or may not flop; we simply don't know. And there is no way to know.

Obviously some people in this subforum have already placed preorders; and it is equally clear that some people will not do so until they have evidence that shipping product actually works in the field (and works reliably). I think a case can be made for both points of view.

If we assume the product actually ships, we're looking at about 10 months mining to break even. What's the warranty, 6 months? How is that "high reliability"? There's a good chance they are driving the circuits so hard that it won't even last till break even.

That's why knowing what the chips are is necessary. Since they have less than no reputation, what chips they are using becomes partial validation to their claims.

I wouldn't demand, nor expect, that BFL divulge that. What would be the benefit? Do you know what video processing chip is in your Dell U3011 monitor? What the model number is of the optical drive in your Oppo BDP-83 blu-ray player? What cpu powers your Siemens Gigaset cordless phone? I didn't think so.

But guess what: we buy those things anyway. And why? Because they are very good relative to their competition. In the end, it doesn't matter HOW a device achieves its performance; the key is simply that it DOES, and does so under favourable conditions (of price, noise, heat, size, etc.).

Really, does it really matter what FPGAs BFL uses in their product? If they manage to get 850+MHash/s @ <80W (and low noise and high reliability) isn't that what's really important? Does it matter if they use an Altera XYZ or a Xilinx QRS? I can understand being curious about it, but not to the point of NEEDING to know.

I'm sure once they start shipping, someone will do a "tear down", remove the heatsinks, and we'll all know what chip is being used. And 28nm tech? The unfortunate reality is that we're unlikely to see affordable 28nm FPGAs of any kind before the end of 2012.

so a prof website design is very important

Um what does "purely commercial solution" mean?  Two guys in a loft w/ a corporation and domain name that didn't exist 6 months ago registered through a rent-an-agent service that anyone can use for $99 a year?

BTW ztek is a "commercial" entity and has been selling FPGA for years before Bitcoin even existed. 

http://www.ztex.de/

I highly doubt we will see any FPGA board based on 28 nm FPGA in the near and midterm.
Currently the Spartan 6 is becoming widely avaidable for low volume customers.
It was officially launched two years ago.

The current 28 nm devices from Xilinx and Altera are announced for Q1 2012
and every IC producer is currently besieging TSMC to get some 28nm products(Ti, AMD,Xilinx,Altera,Nvidia ,....).
So make your own guess when we will see both competable prices and general avaidability.

Still no news about the chip inside. I ( like many others on here, I suspect ) will not buy a product if I don't understand or know what is "under the hood". Good luck with the sales before somebody else much more serious comes on the scene and with reliable 28nm tech.

Ipads, Iphones etc are all made in China, do not see anything wrong about Made in China products.  Though for me with regards to food, I would rather give China a miss after all those food scares, but for electronics, there is no way to escape the "Made In China" products.

I second that view.
I highly sympatisate with all enthusiastic FPGA board developers here on the forum since i started the same way,but BFL is still the only purely commercial solution on the market, am I right ?
So if it really would turn out to be easy to outperform them,we will certainly see another commercial competitor on the field soon.But i doubt that will happen within the next months.

I work in a datacenter many many hours per day.  We are running IBM, HP, and Cisco UCS cabinets. I love my job, and I love my datacenters (we have 4 total in different locations).  There is no way in hell I would want to put up with that whirring for more than I already have to. hehe.  Its standard procedure for us to mandate ear plugs when entering our datacenters.   Besides, with hot aisle / cold aisle HVAC, its impossible to find a comfortable temp. LOL.   60F with ice cold air blowing up from the floor plates on one aisle to 85F and dry air on the hot aisle.
Oh, and the lights on the front of the Freaking EMC Symmetrix VMAX racks are BLINDING!

I meant no offense on being from China, it sounds as if you took offense to that. For me, shipping products from China to the US has always been a nightmare, and so I usually avoid it. Thanks for the other info, but you never confirmed (or I may have missed it) that ALL future batches will also ship with the 8gb USB stick and other cables.

As for all the other FPGA's I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to do an apples-to-apples PERFORMANCE / PRICE comparison using the data we have confirmed to date. I do not make purchases or accusations based on emotions as it seems others have done in these crazy threads.  The more people scream SCAM!!! SCAM!! and WOLF!!! WOLF!!! without first having hard evidence, the less attractive bitcoin becomes to folks that are on the fence about it as a legitimate currency.  

Can someone provide me with solid proof, and not opinions, as to why Inaba's observations were not indeed true?  It also seems BFL has been running a legit operation so far. Granted, they have not come through with the expectations, but they were definately not trying to hide anything.  They also have been refunding all the money back to the skeptics that cancel their pre-orders.
Does anyone have any physical proof that BFL has indeed frauded anyone to date? I mean, have they taken money and ran? Have they not refunded the funds to the first group of people that wanted out due to the missed expectations?

I am asking these questions legitimately, since I am looking at investing a good bit of cash with an FPGA maker soon.

Also, what do you think BFL's competition will do once these units hit the market and perform great? Will they drop their prices to get more inline with the MH/$ that the Bitforce unit does? Will they try to develop a better FPGA?

BFL, have you guys copyrighted and/or patented your designs to keep other makers from copying your units once they are in the public?

I love the sound of fans whirring away <3
If I could live in a datacenter, I would

I sleep with 8 5870's and a 6990 mining just fine. 

Although mine are in the basement and I'm two floors up.

Hi, bro.

Ships from China: sorry, i'm proud of Icarus as a MADE IN CHINA product, and i put my name on it. i think of Icarus as my son.

does not include enclosure: 1st batch shipped with a full dev kit, include a platform cable, software in a 8GB usb stick, cables, adapter and standard heatsink and fan. the fan is made by japanese manufacturers and is ball-bearing.

(although some say fans are loud): i can sleep with 2 boards mining in my bedroom. why not try to sleep with 2 mining HD5850s.

I just find the emotional attacks less valuable than the objective attacks. For example, is it possible to say that the widgets work together seamlessly, when apparently, only two have been made?

I find it less valuable to say that BFL is a clusterfuck of a company, than to say that the ROI/payback of the widget is twice as fast as any of their competitors.

I find it hard to take seriously attacks of incompetence, when no one else has produced a widget with comparable hashing capacity.  I guess only incompetent people make technical advances.

I know that this sounds Spock-like, but the hyper-emotional posts are not very productive.

Live long and prosper.

The valid criticism based on real world events, as opposed to the defense based purely on...I'm not sure what...maybe faith in humanity? Hope for a better tomorrow? The resilience of the human spirit?

IMHO something may leak from INTEL,APPLE,SAMSUNG,ATI....ETC...it comes very hard for me to believe that something can leak from a mysterious one man-one cell phone company. Noone except Inaba knows this guy(s).  Where can the leakage be ? Maybe at the sink,in the kitchen ) or in the bathroom...