1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500) — Butterflylabs, is it for real? (Part 2) - page 71.

CubedRoot

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Quote from: Hawkix on December 13, 2011, 09:41:58 AM

Quote from: bulanula on December 13, 2011, 09:30:17 AM

-less power consumption ( don't really care as most miners got free electricity )

There is no such thing as free lunch .. nor electricity.

Well, I know several people whom have electricity built into their monthly lease cost at a flat rate. So, for them electricity is "free", as they can pretty much use as much as they want for the same monthly rent on their apartment.

Hawkix

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Quote from: bulanula on December 13, 2011, 09:30:17 AM

-less power consumption ( don't really care as most miners got free electricity )

There is no such thing as free lunch .. nor electricity.

spiccioli

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nec sine labore

Quote from: bulanula on December 13, 2011, 09:30:17 AM

Advantages to 5970s :

-less noise
-less heat
-less power consumption ( don't really care as most miners got free electricity )

bulanula,

it's all about power consumption.

Here where I live I pay around 0.25 EUR / kWh, a 5970 consumes a lot more than it can mine.

So, while a 5970 could be resold, after one year of 24x7 mining can it be resold at all?

My only doubt right now is about mining 24x7 with the bitforce since it has been designed to work using 1/4th of the energy it is using under real work conditions.

How long before some component on the bitforce, apart from the new power box, dies of over heating/current ?

Best regards.

spiccioli.

fred0

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Quote from: bulanula on December 13, 2011, 09:30:17 AM

-less power consumption ( don't really care as most miners got free electricity )

That's right, because they scam for their electricity, and then spend their bitcoin on silk road.

bulanula

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Advantages to 5970s :

-less noise
-less heat
-less power consumption ( don't really care as most miners got free electricity )
-less expensive ( 600 USD is about £384 and here in the UK the damn 5970s cost £400 at least - $300 for a 5970 was a miracle over in the states )

Disadvantages to 5970s :

-same damn hashrate
-cannot resell at all
-no gaming
-no other purpose at all ( you can hack WPA on GPUs as well as mining SolidCoins )

Conclusion :

For me at least, these units are worthless right now. I would rather get me a 5970 that has many uses and some resale value rather than these units. The 5970 is noisy and makes heat and consumes a ton of power but the price is OK and the performance is the same.

What chips are you using inside ? Altera Hardcopy ? Why are you refusing to tell us that very important information ? If it is to prevent copies than we all know how easily it is to probe the chips via JTAG if you bothered to erase the chip numbers off the top.

IMHO this is still a long way off the promised 1050 Mhash/s, 20W and $499 and those power brick issues are not funny at all.

kronosvl

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From what I understand the product tested by Inaba (thanks Inaba) is not the redesigned product. If that's the case when we will have some numbers with the new product (MH/s, power consumption)?
I'm asking this because from the initially 50MH/w the product is now at ~10MH/w and I'm hopping for a little increase after this redesign.

Speaking of power consumption, can the client run on a router with a custom firmware(linux based like openWRT, Oleg, or others) and USB port instead of a PC?

Thanks in advance for answering my questions

BFL

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Quote from: ?? on ??

How long before the redesigned products will be shipped? Thanks.

It depends on the purchase date. Pre-ordered units will be delivered early January. Delivery times on most orders will fall within the originally scheduled windows.

BFL

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Quote from: rjk on December 13, 2011, 09:10:25 AM

Quote from: BFL on December 13, 2011, 09:08:18 AM

Quote from: ?? on ??

You already redesigned it? What modification? Just the power box change? I'm lost...

The external PSU is not a manufacturing issue. The power system of the PCB has been doubled in capacity to ease the bottleneck caused by the need for power from the chips. This is what we've been working on over the last two weeks.

From what I understand, some of the additional power consumption is because of the power circuit being run above design levels. Once the power circuitry is oversized, the efficiency should increase, and the total consumption should decrease overall. Is this correct?

Correct.

rjk

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1ngldh

Quote from: BFL on December 13, 2011, 09:08:18 AM

Quote from: ?? on ??

You already redesigned it? What modification? Just the power box change? I'm lost...

The external PSU is not a manufacturing issue. The power system of the PCB has been doubled in capacity to ease the bottleneck caused by the need for power from the chips. This is what we've been working on over the last two weeks.

From what I understand, some of the additional power consumption is because of the power circuit being run above design levels. Once the power circuitry is oversized, the efficiency should increase, and the total consumption should decrease overall. Is this correct?

BFL

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Quote from: ?? on ??

You already redesigned it? What modification? Just the power box change? I'm lost...

The external PSU is not a manufacturing issue. The power system of the PCB has been doubled in capacity to ease the bottleneck caused by the power needed by the processor chips. This is what we've been working on over the last two weeks.

BFL

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Quote from: ?? on ??

"end of our development process"

I hope you meant you will redesign this, get the power fixed. Get the temps down...

Yes, in case this was not clear... this modification has already been made and production units are currently underway with twice the power capacity.

BFL

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Quote from: makomk on December 13, 2011, 06:36:03 AM

Don't suppose anyone would be willing to give me a copy of the protocol specs and access to a box or VM with a board connected? I already have a poclbm-based FPGA mining client lying around that could almost certainly be adapted. (It does fancy things like pool failover, roll-ntime support and testing found nonces against the previous work unit as well as the current one for increased efficiency.)

Please email me at office @ butterflylabs and I'll set you up with the protocol and a machine hosting one of the test units. FYI - we will be publishing the protocol soon as well.

Regards,
BFL

legolouman

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Decent Programmer to boot!

Great work Inaba.

I'm not neglecting the use of a working FPGA, but BFL really needs to get their stuff together, the power usage thing, just doesn't seem to add up on their part.

You know what output you want, and how much energy it will take to get there, why was the unit designed with parts that were less than capable of hitting that point?

makomk

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Quote from: BFL on December 13, 2011, 01:18:55 AM

Our prototype units consume more power than was initially expected. As someone who has had similar experiences here pointed out, the toggle rates required for bitcoin mining are a surprise. Simply put, our power system wasn't designed to supply that great a load so we had to tune the chips down to 832 mh/s to meet the available power.

This was actually one of the things that worried me at the time; if you didn't realise that Bitcoin mining would use so much power it seemed unlikely that you would've designed the boards with power circuitry capable of handling its power consumption. (The various Spartan-6 boards have generally been designed with regulators capable of handling the maximum possible power usage.) It may have been a good idea to be more open about the problems you were experiencing.

I actually managed to blow up a wall wart testing the 25 MHash/sec bitstream mentioned in my sig, and that was obviously a lot smaller-scale than your BitForce boards!

Quote from: Inaba on December 13, 2011, 12:00:07 AM

Late this afternoon, I was sent the latest codeset to the modified Ufasoft miner for review. After trying to compile it again, with the same results and trying several different scenarios, I was still unable to compile the software. I dug a little deeper into the error and consulted with BFL and we determined that the Ufasoft codebase is not 64 bit ready, and thus would not compile on my laptop.

Don't suppose anyone would be willing to give me a copy of the protocol specs and access to a box or VM with a board connected? I already have a poclbm-based FPGA mining client lying around that could almost certainly be adapted. (It does fancy things like pool failover, roll-ntime support and testing found nonces against the previous work unit as well as the current one for increased efficiency.)

xzion

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Quote from: ?? on ??

How soon will the unicorn fail? Can it even run for an hour at the current temps? I do not think I will be placing an order any time soon...

Anyway, when will these units be shipped out? Thanks,

they've stated that they've beefed up the power brick. that should solve most of the heat problems, and perhaps a bit of the power/hashrate deficits, as inaba speculated.
just a waiting game now.

EDIT: didn't actually realise they'd knocked $100 off the price, even though the delivery units will ship with the better power block. tough decision.

plastic.elastic

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Quote from: CubedRoot on December 13, 2011, 02:41:13 AM

Quote from: plastic.elastic on December 13, 2011, 02:15:41 AM

Quote from: ?? on ??

"end of our development process"

Wow, that was not expected! You are just going to sell these as is? Even with the fail rate that Inaba suspects? (His opinion/guess. Not a fact)

I hope you meant you will redesign this, get the power fixed. Get the temps down...

They cant change much now if the production is already underway. The power brick can be easily replaced with something better.

The unicorn has turned into a fancy horse after all.

Nzhang is working on something interested, His board is 2x more expensive but at 4x less power consumption.

Again, at these relatively low power levels, a board that is twice as expensive is going to take a LONG time to recover the costs. If as you say Nzhang's boards are about 20 watts, you only have about 60 watts difference. How long does it take you to recover the additional $600 in expenses on a 60 watt difference?
Power in my area is .$09 per killowatt hour.
.095 / 1000 watts = $.000095 per watt hour.
20 watts running 730 hours (I figured that for a month) at my rate of $.095 = ~ 14.06 KW/hours or total cost of about $1.34 / month
80 watts running 730 hours (I figured that for a month) at my rate of $.095 = ~ 51.10 KW/hours or total cost of about $4.85 / month

So that means it would take you about 170 months to recover the cost differential between the BFL unit and the Nzhang unit....thats assuming they output close the same performance, and we are only figuring power differential.

If my math is off, please let me know...its 2am and I have been drinking a little :O

Your math is not off, but your theory is lacking.
Because not everyone only focus on ROI. There is also Opportunity cost which is related to mining capacity.

Your theory is flawed because you assume difficulty stay constant which its not. Hence the mining capacity is mentioned. I doubt the difficulty will stay the same for long.

CubedRoot

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Quote from: plastic.elastic on December 13, 2011, 02:15:41 AM

Quote from: ?? on ??

"end of our development process"

Wow, that was not expected! You are just going to sell these as is? Even with the fail rate that Inaba suspects? (His opinion/guess. Not a fact)

I hope you meant you will redesign this, get the power fixed. Get the temps down...

They cant change much now if the production is already underway. The power brick can be easily replaced with something better.

The unicorn has turned into a fancy horse after all.

Nzhang is working on something interested, His board is 2x more expensive but at 4x less power consumption.

Again, at these relatively low power levels, a board that is twice as expensive is going to take a LONG time to recover the costs. If as you say Nzhang's boards are about 20 watts, you only have about 60 watts difference. How long does it take you to recover the additional $600 in expenses on a 60 watt difference?
Power in my area is .$09 per killowatt hour.
.095 / 1000 watts = $.000095 per watt hour.
20 watts running 730 hours (I figured that for a month) at my rate of $.095 = ~ 14.06 KW/hours or total cost of about $1.34 / month
80 watts running 730 hours (I figured that for a month) at my rate of $.095 = ~ 51.10 KW/hours or total cost of about $4.85 / month

So that means it would take you about 170 months to recover the cost differential between the BFL unit and the Nzhang unit....thats assuming they output close the same performance, and we are only figuring power differential.

If my math is off, please let me know...its 2am and I have been drinking a little :O

plastic.elastic

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Quote from: ?? on ??

"end of our development process"

Wow, that was not expected! You are just going to sell these as is? Even with the fail rate that Inaba suspects? (His opinion/guess. Not a fact)

I hope you meant you will redesign this, get the power fixed. Get the temps down...

They cant change much now if the production is already underway. The power brick can be easily replaced with something better.

The unicorn has turned into a fancy horse after all.

Nzhang is working on something interested, His board is 2x more expensive but at 4x less power consumption.

CubedRoot

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Activity: 291

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Quote from: Turbor on December 13, 2011, 01:58:36 AM

Looks like beta stage to me. The prize is interesting. The hashrate and power requirements not really. With 5 ztex boards you mine at 950+ MH/s @ 50 watts.

Yeah, but those 5 ztex board will run you over $2k.... over 3 times what the BFL costs. Thats a LONG time to wait to start making revenues on the same performing kit, even with power considerations.

Turbor

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BitMinter

Looks like beta stage to me. The prize is interesting. The hashrate and power requirements not really. With 5 ztex boards you mine at 950+ MH/s @ 50 watts.

Topic: 1GH/s, 20w, $700 (was $500) — Butterflylabs, is it for real? (Part 2) - page 71. (Read 146909 times)