Acorn M.2 FPGA based GPU Accelerator - page 52.

jmigdlc99

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Quote from: 64dimensions on July 12, 2018, 03:54:49 PM

For the Acorn accelerator, would the 480/470 class cards be interchangeable with their 580/570 counterparts?

Searched and back read a little, can't seem to find any answer to this yet.

Asking again because i have old rigs and am also interested in knowing if these acorns will also work on rx 470/480 GPUs and whether or not they will share close to, if not the similar, hashrates/improvements as the 570/580 series GPUs.

gsrcrxsi314

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Just want to make sure I’ve got this right so far.

No word how these things boost pure ETH mining, if at all, right?

dsmn

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Quote from: philipma1957 on July 15, 2018, 06:07:17 PM

I am going to try to create a contest for the most clever use of a two card nest.

Well incase the onboard pcie switch on the nest2g card makes the acorn talk direct with the gpu, so the high throughput data never reach the pcie bus of the motherboard only work and result, and the nest2g then can run of a 1x port, then I can come up with some pretty faar out ideas

philipma1957

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Quote from: philipma1957 on July 15, 2018, 11:26:53 AM

Quote from: vuli1 on July 15, 2018, 04:48:59 AM

I thiink on Z77 I had max Pci e 1.1 with Celeron and hd 6870. But on Z170 all RX are runing on 3.0 and 006 ver . eitherway, 1.0 is more than enough for mining cards. For Acron, not sure, didnt pay attention.

I have 4 or 5 z170 boards from biostar https://www.amazon.com/Biostar-RACING-Z170GT7-Intel-Motherboard/dp/B06XDKHN1S

I think that these boards with the nest x2g and acorn 215+ will be true beasts

This board may do four four card nests. 16 x 15 = 240 watts

16 x 15 = 240 hash

That is like 12 1080tis which would use over 2000 watts

Costly as 16 x 330 = 5k and 520 for nests total of 5500

ZedZedNova

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Quote from: dsmn on July 15, 2018, 07:57:16 PM

Site says nothing about bifurcation, but it imply that the board does it since it says any pcie 2.0 x8 or higher port will work.

Early on, before the Nest boards were announced, the only way that a quad M.2 riser board would work with the Acorns was if the BIOS/MB supported bifurcation of the PCIe bus.

Because the Nest boards have an on-board PCIe switch, bifurcation support is no longer needed, which is why the web site says "without any special motherboard requirements."

There was a lot of discussion in the discord channel regarding bifurcation, and what MBs supported it, in the last few weeks leading up to the product release.

ZedZedNova

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Quote from: philipma1957 on July 15, 2018, 06:07:17 PM

Quote from: OurManInHavana on July 15, 2018, 05:23:46 PM

With current low prices for the coins an Acorn can help with, all the scenarios I've looked at show that they'll pay for themselves in 12-18 months. Is that what other people are coming up with too?

Can't wait to see some real $/day improvements when they ship: so many GPU/MB combo's to try!

I am going to try to create a contest for the most clever use of a two card nest

And of a four card nest.

I may need to run it on discord and not here.

so I've been thinking more about interesting use of Nest X2G...

What it you used this MB: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182968
Populated the 7 PCIe x16 slots (configured as x16/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8/x8) with Nest X2G
Filled the four Nest X2Gs with Acorn CLE-215+ (total of 14 Acorns)
and then used the risers (yeah, yeah, I know...) to host RX570 GPUs (total of 28)

The target here is mining X16R. When used with RX570s only 42% of the CLE-215+ capacity is used, so you can boost two RX570s with one CLE-215+ and still have 16% of the CLE-215+ capacity available. If you are OK with slightly less boost, you could use CLE-215 (non plus model) for two RX570s.

Assuming that my math is correct, that config would be like mining with 70 RX570s, but with an approximate power cost equivalent of 32 RX570s.

Google tells me (for whatever that's worth) that with an 8GB RX570 Nitro+ you can get ~6.7MH/s, so that's ~469 MH/s in this franken-rig.

The thing that concerns me is the spacing of the PCIe x16 slots. Not sure that there is enough space for the Acorns with their heat sinks. Now if you could find an x16 to x16 riser that wasn't a cable... throw in four of them to stagger the height of the Nest X2Gs...

OK, time to go get some grilled beef, and deep fried chicken.

EDIT: Ignore my bloviating. BIOSes limit to 13 GPUs max. Per GPUHoarder from just a few minutes ago on discord channel when I asked about this config.

dsmn

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Site says nothing about bifurcation, but it imply that the board does it since it says any pcie 2.0 x8 or higher port will work.

About the gpu's, most likely their comunication with the fpga's goes through the onboard switch nest2g have only, so the motherboard does not matter in this case, I dont understand why Nest2G would even require the x8 2.0 motherboard port, cant see what the high bandwidth there will do, other than for cross communication if you have multiple nest2g. But that makes no sense.

But thats how it is with a product like this, there is so manny options that they will need to hit the market before all use cases will be tested.

EDIT: Hmm thought about it and yeah cant see at all what high data throughput there would be on the motherboard from having multiple nest2g with 2 or 4 gpu's connected to the onboard ports, they should each talk with their gpu's over their onboard switch and there should be no cross communication over the motherboard since each nest2g will have its own acorn and gpu's, the data comming in and out of that nest2g pcie interface to motherboard should be just work and results. And therefor you should be able to just stick them in a 1x port.

This is all theory!!!!!!!!!!!!
But what do you think ?

ZedZedNova

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Quote from: dsmn on July 15, 2018, 06:17:37 PM

Quote from: ZedZedNova on July 15, 2018, 06:09:05 PM

The Nest X4 has a PCIe switch so it eliminates the need for the MB to support bifurcation to share the power of the acorns.

Inetresting, does the Nest X2G also do that ?

https://store.squirrelsresearch.com/acorn/acorn-nest-x2g/

Quote from: https://store.squirrelsresearch.com/acorn/acorn-nest-x2g/

Acorn Nest X2G allows you to host two Acorn units in any PCIe 2.0 or greater x8 or x16 slot and provides four USB PCIe riser connections for accelerated GPUs without any special motherboard requirements.

Requirements:
PCIe 2.0 or greater x8 or x16 slot

Based on that information, I would say yes.

philipma1957

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Quote from: dsmn on July 15, 2018, 06:17:37 PM

Quote from: ZedZedNova on July 15, 2018, 06:09:05 PM

The Nest X4 has a PCIe switch so it eliminates the need for the MB to support bifurcation to share the power of the acorns.

Inetresting, does the Nest X2G also do that ?

I hope so as I purchased one of them and did not buy the four card one.

Still waiting for that order to be corrected as there is an error on the squirrelsresearch website for my order.

dsmn

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Quote from: ZedZedNova on July 15, 2018, 06:09:05 PM

The Nest X4 has a PCIe switch so it eliminates the need for the MB to support bifurcation to share the power of the acorns.

Inetresting, does the Nest X2G also do that ?

ZedZedNova

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Quote from: philipma1957 on July 15, 2018, 06:07:17 PM

Quote from: OurManInHavana on July 15, 2018, 05:23:46 PM

With current low prices for the coins an Acorn can help with, all the scenarios I've looked at show that they'll pay for themselves in 12-18 months. Is that what other people are coming up with too?

Can't wait to see some real $/day improvements when they ship: so many GPU/MB combo's to try!

I am going to try to create a contest for the most clever use of a two card nest

And of a four card nest.

I may need to run it on discord and not here.

heh, been thinking about that already Phil.

Not actually a two card nest, but hey... hobby miners got to play, right? Wink

Nest X4 w/ 4 CLE-215+ in an x16 slot, plus the two 1080Ti hybrids each in an X4 slot, dual-mine ETH (acorn/squirrels miner has ETHLargement pill built-in) and something else, until ETH really, really goes POS. Unless I can score some super cheap Vega FE cards, in which case I'll build a 2nd miner leaving my 1080Ti hybrids doing their thing on X16R coins.

ZedZedNova

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Interesting quote I gleaned by reading the earlier posts (this one came through at 1:15am UTC-4) on the #gpuhoarder-products channel in the FPGA discord:

Quote from: GPUHoarder

stick with me - load up on rx550 and 560s 4:1 with acorns in a Nest X4

I believe that was in response to someone who had observed that lots of prior posts were talking about monster MBs and CPUs, specifically the new threadripper and Epyc ones.

The Nest X4 has a PCIe switch so it eliminates the need for the MB to support bifurcation to share the power of the acorns.

philipma1957

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Quote from: OurManInHavana on July 15, 2018, 05:23:46 PM

With current low prices for the coins an Acorn can help with, all the scenarios I've looked at show that they'll pay for themselves in 12-18 months. Is that what other people are coming up with too?

Can't wait to see some real $/day improvements when they ship: so many GPU/MB combo's to try!

I am going to try to create a contest for the most clever use of a two card nest

And of a four card nest.

I may need to run it on discord and not here.

dsmn

jr. member

Activity: 68

Merit: 4

Quote from: OurManInHavana on July 15, 2018, 05:23:46 PM

With current low prices for the coins an Acorn can help with, all the scenarios I've looked at show that they'll pay for themselves in 12-18 months. Is that what other people are coming up with too?

Can't wait to see some real $/day improvements when they ship: so many GPU/MB combo's to try!

Hmm they do x2 x3 the speed on some algorithms if your gpu's are set up right. If thats not real $ per day improvements I dont know what is hehe, the big problem right now is that we are in a major reversal trend.

OurManInHavana

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With current low prices for the coins an Acorn can help with, all the scenarios I've looked at show that they'll pay for themselves in 12-18 months. Is that what other people are coming up with too?

Can't wait to see some real $/day improvements when they ship: so many GPU/MB combo's to try!

ZedZedNova

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Activity: 475

Merit: 265

Ooh La La, C'est Zoom!

Quote from: philipma1957 on July 15, 2018, 03:22:14 PM

MARVELL2 = correct on fuck risers Grin

As to what is best to do buy a shit ton of these acorns or wait. Waiting is better.

Buying 2 and a nest at 330+330+99 = 769 + shipping is also okay

Buying 02 of these with or without nests is hard to do it is a lot of coin up front and a clear picture is not here.

Ie a 2 card nest does x hash at x watts = I don't know

If I knew a 2 card nest did 40mh of x16r at 60 watts I would like that.

as a 1080ti does 20mh at 200 watts

From what I understand by reading the info on the squirrels web pages and reading the discord (before the message traffic went crazy, mostly with the same questions over and over), the CLE-215 and CLE-215+ consume up to ~15 watts each.

So your proposed scenario of 2 card nest would consume ~30 watts. The question then becomes one of what the hash rate of the CLE-215+, the only one so far that GPUHoarder and team say can mine stand-alone, would be on X16R. The stand-alone mining numbers have not been released yet, but should be coming Soon^TM.

When a CLE-215+ is used to boost a 1080Ti in a 1:1 configuration, you get a 76% improvement (1.76x) in hash rate on X16R, so the 20mh of the 1080Ti alone becomes ~35mh when boosted, and the combined total power is 216 Watts.

Additionally, it appears that using a CLE-215+ can allow dual mining. If I understand correctly, the CLE-215+ handles/shares the core heavy algorithm while the GPU handles the memory heavy algorithm.

philipma1957

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'The right to privacy matters'

MARVELL2 = correct on fuck risers Grin

As to what is best to do buy a shit ton of these acorns or wait. Waiting is better.

Buying 2 and a nest at 330+330+99 = 769 + shipping is also okay

Buying 02 of these with or without nests is hard to do it is a lot of coin up front and a clear picture is not here.

Ie a 2 card nest does x hash at x watts = I don't know

If I knew a 2 card nest did 40mh of x16r at 60 watts I would like that.

as a 1080ti does 20mh at 200 watts

Pennywis3

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Quote from: Marvell2 on July 15, 2018, 12:40:25 PM

the jury is out anyways on weather it will be better to buy next gen cards vs these fpga deals too many moving oarts imo, need new motherboards specific cpus etc , how bout i grab a gtx 1180 for $600 that hashes at stright up twice the hash rate of an 1080 and worry about fpga later when new 8 card boards with better features come out.

It makes no sense to replace hardware (mother boards and cpus) with new gear unless you are building a new system or app specific boards are released.

fuck risers

I seriously doubt you will get 1180 for 600$ Cheesy

bswilmington

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Quote from: Marvell2 on July 15, 2018, 12:40:25 PM

the jury is out anyways on weather it will be better to buy next gen cards vs these fpga deals too many moving oarts imo, need new motherboards specific cpus etc , how bout i grab a gtx 1180 for $600 that hashes at stright up twice the hash rate of an 1080 and worry about fpga later when new 8 card boards with better features come out.

It makes no sense to replace hardware (mother boards and cpus) with new gear unless you are building a new system or app specific boards are released.

fuck risers

where have you found the hashrates of the new GPUs? I can't even find a release date

Marvell2

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the jury is out anyways on weather it will be better to buy next gen cards vs these fpga deals too many moving oarts imo, need new motherboards specific cpus etc , how bout i grab a gtx 1180 for $600 that hashes at stright up twice the hash rate of an 1080 and worry about fpga later when new 8 card boards with better features come out.

It makes no sense to replace hardware (mother boards and cpus) with new gear unless you are building a new system or app specific boards are released.

fuck risers

Topic: Acorn M.2 FPGA based GPU Accelerator - page 52. (Read 73496 times)