Topic: A custom designed FPGA miner for LTC? - page 3. (Read 5814 times)

When LTC gets over $5.  Right now I'm find using ASICs for BTC and GPUs for LTC and scrypts.

But look into what is coming to market right now in FPGAs.

Thanks!  I'm seeing it.

I'm from the USA.  Right now I'm in Ecuador, but the contract I was on ended and I'll be heading back in the next couple of weeks.
Specifically I reside in Phoenix AZ.

I'll invest 1 ltc.

Actual ammount, .898 LTC

Transaction sent
ID:ce81163ab1903c85b5f4b4ef79657472477eab20b7bc3bb85ca6529008fb0733

Or is interested in it for reasons of academic curiosity and not an attempt to make a commercial product or recoup investment later
I'm interested in hearing your SRAM idea as well as your other theories.

Yes I will tell you.  In fact that is one of the reasons I started this topic.  Anderl is right about the FPGA being an Altera Stratix.

Thanks what address did you send from?

Yes, he did mention the extra cost due to the nature of development boards. I honestly expect any device capable of decent scrypt hashing to be rather pricey, that's one of the main points.

You haven't looked hard enough.  Some of the latest gen FPGA Stratix V development boards by Altera are running about 9k to 12k each.

I've worked with their older boards.  There is another theoretical route he can try to take which uses some of the recent innovations with SRAM.  I have my own theories and I've mocked up some code but I don't have plans to buy a board to implement them.

For Scrypt it is not worth the time and money.  The total circulation and average daily transactions of LTC does not make it a good investment.  Anyone trying to implement a FGPA for Scrypt while LTC is under $5 is a scam (not directed at OP), or has not done the math.

Perhaps Nova can tell us exactly what FPGA IC costs 10,000 dollars. I have looked at the manufactures and I dont see any chip that 10K

Hi Nova following along with your thread. Are you located in the United States by chance?

Sent some LTC your way, definitely interesting.

This sounds interesting - watching

Okay, thanks!

Thanks I'll send you the same thing I do viceroy in the morning.  Need sleep now.

Oh I see I was mistaken. That's going to require both core density and a very large amount of the particularly expensive on-die cache, no? What process node is this based on? 


Are you looking to battle against 7990s and the like in both pure hashrate and efficiency?

It's an FPGA with a crap ton of on-die ram.  There is nothing magical about the chip.  By the time it comes down in price there will be better chips.
If I can find a less expensive one with that much ram tacked on, I will go with that instead.

On that point I'm open to suggestions.

Fair enough, but I would definitely consider it an investment. IP can be just as valuable as monetary returns if not more.  


I do understand your concept, actually one of the LTC devs already proposed the idea for 'setup and teardown' by a separate processor.

You are proposing both a shared and dedicated cache, correct? In essence, it would be similar to the gpu lookup gap function we see now, just without the dedicated co-processor. I would be interested in hearing the specifications of both caches and the link width (if you are attempting to avoid on-die cache like I think).

I'll send you a PM in the morning, I need to get some sleep now.  The short of it is already up at the top and covers 3/4ths of the idea.  The other 1/4th is implementation specific details.

What investors?  I don't recall asking for investors at all.  I'm offering to share what I learn as I do this, period.  
If the information is of no value to you, then don't stress you're probably not the target audience.  
If it's something that piques your interest, pitch in.

Yes actually I'm fairly certain no one else is working on this and no one has a significant head start.  
I'm confident, because I've read what people are doing.  This is different, if you don't understand from my description how it's different then please re-read mine vs theirs.
I've also talked to the people who are working on FPGAs for litecoin they say it's intriguing but obviously they're targeting different hardware so this clearly wouldn't work for them.  

Point of fact at today prices, dollar for dollar you will get more hashing power with theirs.  That will probably be the case for a year or two.

This isn't about that, it's about a shortcut in scrypt that can be implemented in next gen FPGAs and which eliminates the memory bus problem.  
I'm saying I want to explore that particular shortcut, I don't have the resources to do the exploration, so if you want to chip in I'll let you know what I find.
Otherwise I will do it whenever I can.

Typo in the name of a mfr, sorry for that.  I'm tired it's 1:30 AM.  As long you understood who i meant, but just to clear up confusion http://www.xilinx.com/ good company, but doesn't make what I'm working on here.

You're not wrong, but you're assuming that the FPGA & devboard will stay the same price forever.  
My experience has been that these things go down and do so rather rapidly.  
Also it's not just the FPGA, a significant portion of that cost is in the board.
There is a bunch of stuff on the board that this project doesn't need, but it's on there anyways because it's a devboard.

When completed you would have all of the knowledge that I have attained in this endeavor.  
I'm only asking for donations because I'd like to move on this more quickly than my personal budget will allow.  
I am currently in a downtime situation where I have a couple months to throw full-time into this.