Topic: ALLMINE INC - FPGA Cryptominer - page 53. (Read 51510 times)

There is a lot of talk on two threads here about these fpga cards for mining but very little information and zero evidence that any of it even works.  Sure, I'll spend $35k on a rig with a $450 per day return.  Prove that it works.

Those aren't in mass production yet.

Maybe they mean the VU31P and not the 13P?  The 31P has 4GB of HBM2 memory, which would be better for equihash than the VU9P.

Im interested 3 or 4 units from mex

No, if he releases bitstreams for the VCU1525, it would work on the boards I'd make. And, the board I'd make would be equivalent to the product id you mentioned. The only difference is it will be cheaper once the $4,000 avnet promo ends. Avnet and Digi will both increase their price to $5200 for small MOQ. I would still be offering at $4k or less (hopefully, if we can get 10k orders).

+1

Im kean.

Just a noob question if you don't mind: Will your design require a different bitstream from @whitefire990 than the one he will be releasing for the
DK-U1-VCU1525-A-G by the end of this months?

I'am asking as I have a quote for 2 DK-U1-VCU1525-A-G in South Africa but If I need to wait a few weeks to get the more mining dedicated version from you I might be willing.

I'm in! 10units/month

i'm in too and i can buy at least 50 units and me too in a farm with investors. please get in touch

Definitely interested if the order is possible. Would sell off some rigs and willing to purchase around 25-30 Units minimum depending on the price possible. Only problem is would need some programs to be released with reasonable dev fees, or reasonable upfront costs. I dont have problems with Dev Fees, as majority of the good miners all have them, if they are reasonable i will support, or willing to pay monthly/yearly/one time for the miner.

Also i understand where you are coming from with the backout from backers. I had investors lined up in 2017 to build a large mining farm with solar panels, and had them backout during the crash. I still know plenty of investors and could potentially line up more units after the initial order. Have to watch how this whole FPGA thing goes as it seems alot are talking about it now, before anything can be done, and would need multiple rigs myself to prove.

Well, it's going be inevitable if whitefire does release his with dev fee. Why not tap into the market and collect residual for yourself regardless? If you have something that is already done, and then whitefire releases his, people are going use whitefire no matter what, since his is the one that is offered to the public.

But if you offered it ahead of the game and/or is better, then at least you get to collect some residual regardless if people want to bypass the dev fee or not.

Not sure how much work that would be needed to do this, but the way I see it, for example;

Lets say 100 people use your service, 50 people bypass the dev fee if that's your concern.
I would rather have 50% of some free residual, then 0% of nothing.

That's just one perspective.

I hate to break it to you but in 6 months Nvidia is going to be making a lot more devices available than the few thousand OP is talking about.  You can either evolve with the technology or get left behind

Ya, I've never seen any of these companies offer a promo price for a new fpga dev board. Normally 'promo price' to these companies would mean 10x the mass production price.

I'm considering the solution of using a shell (like aws) pass some wires through and allow any fpga dev to build and compile against our shell. We'll then distribute the firmware and collect the developer fee on behalf of the dev. There are a lot of FPGA devs in this community, a lot more than have been posting in the threads. I'm guessing they just haven't seen it yet.

It seems like there's not a lot of enthusiasm that there's only 1 dev providing firmware to the community. It would be nice to provide a platform that would allow any dev to create firmware and profit from the work.

Really? This is standard operating procedure for Xilinx. Dev boards are usually sold cheaper than even just the chip cost for normal quantities. They want to make it easy for people to build things around their expensive chips, but still make all the margins on chips. I too have been talking to Xilinx and trying to get them to see there is a big market here, big enough to make up for their margins on some of these chips.

There is more FPGA hardware coming pretty soon (over the next 2-3 months)  from a few sources (disclosure - myself included). Generally speaking most are going to be in the same ballpark cost/performance, but there may be outliers or easier entry level costs.

The problem with FPGAs is it is very hard to protect the bitstream if you aren’t selling the hardware. You can sell hardware that will work with your encrypted bitstreams and also support unencrypted bitstreams (anyone can make new miners). You can also lock hardware to only your encrypted bitstreams. But if you don’t sell the hardware (and burn in the encryption keys) anyone can copy it. So that leaves virtuous open source, or people making profit on hardware alone. The tools and time to develop these things are very expensive, so you likely won’t find a lot of people giving it away for free. Development time is also much longer. If I make a change that actually needs tested on real hardware of VCU1525 size, expect hours for a very fast computer  to synthesize and route it before I can test it. A lot can be done in simulation, but the last mile takes a lot of time.

It is possible to use normal methods to try and protect the “command and control” normal software that drives the FPGA, but someone could reverse engineer that - just like OpenCL kernels.

If you think the FPGA is magic and the OpenCL compiler will give you 10-50x performance over your GPU, you will be sorely disappointed. Those of us seeing these gains are (afaik) writing very low level RTL to do so. There’s a big difference between OpenCL and RTL for FPGAs vs OpenCL vs ISA Assembky for GPUs.

Shut up and take my money

It's the first time I've ever seen a company do that with FPGAs, that's for sure. Only avnet is doing it, digikey wants $5200/board for low QTY. My pricing just depends on chip order quantity, the more ordered, the lower the price is going to get.

I don't trust % fees for dev services because they're so easy to avoid paying.

no interest in selling your miner or dev services?

also is that normal to have the intro pricing then jack it up, whitefire also says its $4k now but 5k + next month

No. The bitstreams can be loaded via USB.

Whitefire990 mentions he uses USB for programming and communication in his thread. His software would be the one to program the board.

If you are good enough to develop your own, you know the question to this.

how would we load the various bitstreams onto these things? we would need special software?