Topic: Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now! - page 200. (Read 529093 times)

Yeah, I think they are behind.  It will be interesting if they can actually pull this off with a July delivery.

I dont understand why the webgui will not work, because alpha has posted screenshots of it and also the display was ready. I cant understand, every day something new .......

Perhaps I missed something--and I didn't check the links out, so maybe you will know so please correct me if I am wrong. How are they filling more boards with more chips, if their original order was for just enough to cover current orders plus some spares?

Thanks for mentioning the update. Sounds like a compromise. I was actually looking forward to the cloud hashing but I'm good
with a 50Mh unit, that is 10X the original amount, but that is what the market demands it seems.

The only bad thing is I already sold my Raspberry PI and that sort of sucks as I have to buy another and reinstall everything and such.
Also, not familiar with running anything outside of MinePeon. Any ideas here guys, should I go with (forget) the other Raspberry Pi like unit - beagle something or other lol?

Regarding making the changes, I think that is easy for them to do. They are just taking out the brains of the unit ad the display. That takes no work on their part.
And the units were designed to add more hashing power to, looks like they will now come full!

Vesperwillow - I don't agree with all of your points. For sure they felt the heat but that is not a secret, that is a part of the industry. Giving more hashing and taking away
the before mentioned features saves money and the chips are pretty cheap to make. They are just filling the units with more boards. The only increase in efficiency will
be what they have taken out, outside of that the units will use a respectively calculated amount of electricity more, nothing surprising there.

IAS

If I had to place a bet, I'd say they're not getting the swift "remaining payments" that they thought they would, due to their cloudy transparency and impossible timeline. So they're telling people you'll get more hash, and free cloudhashing, and they're just adding more and more sugar on the deal.

With the chip design out of their hands, there's no logical way they could be upping the efficiency, unless their interpreter code was so far off the mark to begin with. The odds of which are very low.

Alpha have upped their specs again

https://alpha-t.net/news/performance-increase/

I'm really not sure what to make of this. In their letter from the Managing director they slagged off other companies for doing this sort of thing two months ago.

https://alpha-t.net/news/letter-managing-director/

I can't see how they can radically change specs this late in the game and deliver the units on time.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Yeah, thanks for sharing this info to us and I think it worth to think more and prepare to reduce possible risks.

Yep same thing happened at CoinTerra. Lots of people fighting for refunds there and getting lawyered up.

http://forum.cointerra.com/forums/forum-help-assistance.19/

And then there's Hashfast. They ran into problems during the manufacturing process and are now on the verge of being involuntarily liquidated 
http://www.coindesk.com/asic-manufacturer-hashfast-faces-legal-action/

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/bitcoin-miner-startup-hashfast-could-be-forced-to-liquidate-itself/

There is a very real chance of things going wrong. Please bear that in mind

Well there is the grey area.  Zeusminer is having problems because they promised certain specs but then changed them after the no refund window.  It screwed a lot of customers that now can't run the units because they don't have the capacity at their homes.  Does the product work, yes.  Is it what was quoted, no.  So that is when you have to get ahold of a lawyer.    

If the go bankrupt them it is the competence of management that is at fault.  I believe they may be held liable because the sold a product that they could not produce.  SO again you contact a lawyer.

You get to reflect back, years from now, on how your endeavor with Cryptos failed. But on the bright side they succeeded. 
And it is a write off.

But to be honest, I really really doubt the batch is going to be bad. That is like praying for bad stuff to happen...

What happens when they spend all our money and the entire batch of chips doesnt work? /bankruptcy?

Yep. This seems like an extremely high risk strategy. After watching the unfolding car crash at Cointerra I'm very dubious about the success of this approach

Yes, I agree with you that GPU is and will be a major mining method which has been popular for a long time and should be included to the Miner too double way to mine coins.

If I had a bunch of high end graphics cards, then at least I have some great gaming hardware. I could do some gaming in 4k or sell off the hardware and get some of my money back.

As a newbie strongly considering entering the mining arena, I actually really hope gpu's will remain a viable option for a while. What if this cryptocurrency ship sinks? Asic chips then become worthless hardware that you can't get rid of.

I suspect that they will not be all that profitable once you actually get it in your hands. I suspect AMD will answer the newly increased demand with more supply and gpu farms will get even larger than they already are.

Thanks for the reply, especially that 2nd paragraph. I had no idea and wish that had been communicated (if indeed true in this instance.)
Hopefully it works out for us in the end (and to be honest I think things are so early that if you just have a handful of coins in a few years, it will)...
Anyway, hoping that the quality is up to par and that the design was pretty straight forward and works!

Its about sharing

Honestly, considering the bulk of the hashrate will be supplied by 'cloud hashing' the details are far more important in that aspect.  The terms need to be disclosed before I would consider paying out the balance owed.

At roughly 0.003BTC per Mh/s earned I am more likely to complete the transaction if the ROI is less than 3 months, probably closer to 2.  The more interesting alts coming out now are not scrypt at all so a GPU investment may be in order instead.  Just some thoughts for the future.

^-- That is exactly the point I was making. They're flying by the seat of their pants on this run, most likely. Unless they taped out sooner than they claimed, the likelihood of July shipments is not likely, not with a tested unit.

Thanks I updated my links.

Yes Fiaz posted that they paid for faster tape out.  Buy he also specifically posted that they paid more for bulk sample chips.  Faster tape out for 28nm means more on the 90 day side than the 120 day side of tape out.  That is what is meant by faster for tape out on 28nm die.  Usually this is done by eliminating the additional rounds of design optimizations.  They send you a sample batch, you don't like the quality or performance.  You ask for changes and they tape out another batch and sent them to you for testing.  Usually 3 rounds are paid for before you approve the chips for mass production.

What I am concerned about is the bulk order of sample chips.  These sample chips are the first prototypes sent from the foundry for the designers to test for quality.  The reason manufacturers pay for bulk orders of sample chips is to get better statistical numbers of the quality of fabrication.  This allows them to redesign and optimize and sent it back to the foundry to get better quality chips.  What Fiaz is says is that they will be using the sample chips as production chips to ship out to customers.  If the chips come back as low quality, high percentage of failures per wafer they might still send those out as production chips to customers and never tell them.