Topic: A4 Dominator - Pre-Order Group Buy - 280mh, roughly 1000w, $1800 + shipping - page 57. (Read 122571 times)

It's interesting. If you look at this photo of one of my old A2 Minis and then look at the way Inno designed the A2 farmboy with a single Raspberry Pi controlling 3 miners (or 6 cards) you can see that with the A4 photo we've seen they're simply modifying this model again.

I never tried it (but wish I had), but I now wonder if I could have run 3 A2 minis off 1 Raspberry PI and daughter board. You can see that there's 6 connectors and I'm guessing this is precisely whats inside the 110Mhs A2 Terminator, and looks to be what they're using again with the A4

Like the A4's we've seen, the A2 Mini used a totally separate PSU, but unlike the A4 used 8pin PCIe connectors. I'm a little worried about that but they're not amateurs in the PHY space so I'm hoping they know what they're doing. Even so it looks like they're pulling 550w from 4 x 75w connections.



Note: The pic above is of a data center version of the A2 Mini, the retail one had a shroud over the Raspberry Pi and was painted black. This is how I received mine.

I think you have to be prepared to see an official Inno A4 miner and possibly some third party miners powered by Inno A4 chips. In one of their press releases they mentioned buying chips at $12 ea. The sentence below from the initial press release is pretty telling too.

15-Dec-2015 http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/14.html
Good news for this partnership round: we have opened our A4 ASIC/Miner production to committed partners in order to share in both the cost and the profit. Anyone who commits $1.5 million to this partnership will get to share our ASIC production masks or purchase miners “at cost” for your mining farms. We have fully de-risked the design by shouldering all the R&D and MPW costs for the test chips. Also, we will showcase our testchip and test miners in couple of months to demonstrate the A4’s unsurpassable efficiency.

We need only 4 to 5 partners to participate in this incredible risk free win-win partnership round. This is the best ever opportunity to secure the world’s most profitable mining ASIC/Machines for the years to come. Further details will be available in the, limited member, partnership meeting.

I read this as 'you can either produce your own chips using our production masks, buy complete miners at cost or buy bulk A4 chips at $12ea.

The early bird status just means we're getting them at the same time as the partners, not before.

Well I guess I should start quoting prices to fix the burned PCIe plugs that are going to come from this. .3btc per plug burned plus shipping should do it as long as they didn't put an insane amount of copper into the board underneath.

And if you're thinking just chip off the burned plastic and get back to mining, don't. Either you will plug in the miner wrong by mistake; blowing out everything on every line or the damaged and pitted pins will lift a ground resulting in complete hilarity or you will overheat a pin burning out the internal vias to the power planes, causing all sorts of havoc.

Now for the fun question: Did they put optoisolators on the signal lines to prevent the inevitable lifted grounds from causing ground to rip though either the hashing chips or the level converters? Time will tell....

C

Yet, if the pictures are legit, someone (possibly Inno) is providing those shots of the miners.
They had said earlier that a video and other details would be made available, but it seems that someone has a special deal going on to get 200 units and have pix and such online while the rest of us are still waiting.
Somewhat disappointed, as I thought this was the only pre-order. Now it seems there was a pre-pre-order going on...

Alibaba is just a marketplace like Amazon or eBay. You would need to contact each individual seller for the details and sadly even the presumably "reputable" sellers there lie a lot. Be very careful with the claims that they have the items on hand or "soon". Too many red flags as it is but if you decide to ignore them at least use a buyer-friendly payment method (e.g. a credit card) and be prepared to fight it.

The person I was chatting with said 200 units in Batch 1 and Batch 2 would then be released in Dec

Compression rates are different throughout the photo.  This final image was recompressed at 75%, but has the quality of 40 to 50%. 

For the size of the file, this photo has been purposely compressed to a low quality image and then that low quality image was saved at a higher compression rate -- giving you a bloated file size with extremely low image quality.  A 190kB JPEG image of this size would look so much clearer.

It also contains a Photoshop signature.

Even without using analyzing software, you can easily see "smudged" areas throughout. 

Error Level Analysis clearly shows many parts throughout are not consistent.

Alibaba is just a trade website.  Buying through them can be a big pain.

So, Alibaba has actual miner units in hand or are they privy to details sent to them by Inno and not to the rest of the group?
Anyone know how many units Alibaba has or has ordered?
Interested to know how this folds into our pre-order status.

Can you highlight areas that were altered?

Hmmm - why has this image been altered so much?

VAPORWARE.

No this would be a HUGE deal killer if you needed 2 units because the price quoted is for one unit

Ok, so maybe we are talking about 2 units to make up the 273mh 1100w miner... That would make sense in light of the first picture showing 1 miner on top and 550w, and the 2 miners/cubes on bottom at 1045w.  So possibly 2 cubes to make up the 4 blades we were quoted in the original description as it appears there are only 2 blades per cube.  So that would make sense if that is the case.

That is the intake side and the fan exhausts the heat out of the "front".

Hmmm definitely something not right there as you say, very curious, perhaps they are a hoax seller trying to cash in on the back of it all?? Glad I didn't follow though with an order.

It's a picture of Baikal miner 900 MH/s)

Are there many people who ordered A4 miner?

the same seller is also offering a 300mh a4 for $1000 @ 800w
something is not right there

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/2016-Sep-Latest-A4-Scrypt-miner_60532659791.html

They just came back to me on the Warranty she said it was for 1 year which is pretty good compared with Bitmain

I think I've worked it out, or at least I hope I have. They're fully modular like the Farmboy with each unit only having 2 cards (40 A4 chips each) or 40 x 3.5 = 140 Mhs nominal output. It would be really hard to squeeze 4 cards into that 130mm square extrusion given the cooling required for 1100W. If you could, you'd need left-hand and right-hand cards to install them back to back. The good news is that it looks like they have heat sinks on both sides of the cards and a single fan per unit.

As in the earlier pictures each card has 2 x 6pin PCIe connectors for 300w max available per card. It looks like there's another set of 10 pin connectors between each card and the Raspberry Pi controller which is a standalone unit in the picture above. (it's definitely not connected to one of these A4 units).

My only concern now is the power supply for the raspberry Pi. I hope it's PCIe 6pin because I've already ordered my power supplies based on the specs we were given and assurances from Inno once I'd ordered that they would only need 8 x 6pin. I asked about 20+4 ATX and 4pin 12v but was assured 8 x 6pin PCIe was the only requirement. Thankfully I've got 1500w 10 x 6pin PSU's on the way so have 2 extra connectors I can mod if I need to.

Last thought. 200 Max in batch 1.
No chance. Keep in mind that they were looking for 5 investors with up to 1M each and were promising chips at $12ea initially.

More good news is that it looks like you can run 3 per Raspeberry pi. There's 6 10pin connectors and they quote 550w, 1100w, and 1650w configurations. Well that's what I think it says ;-)
 

What I don't like is blowing all that heat directly on the power connectors.

Seems like there has to be a better way of designing that...

I think the rated spec for those PCIE plugs is only like 200 watts if I recall correctly.  And with the power consumption coming in so high the A4 certainly isn't going to be "Dominating" the Titan's.  I have to admit I am a little disappointed and concerned here.