But please do describe to me how you will be competing with (possibly immersion cooled) equipment with the best W/GH ratio and lowest energy prices on the planet (let´s say 5ct/kwh) by the end of 2014.
The immersion cooling is just about nearly pointless with Bitcoin mining. The only thing that its proponents bring to table are workarounds for lack of proper design and engineering. Immersion cooling with 3M engineered fluids only makes sense if there are real constraints on the cooled equipment: speed of light limitation, unusual complexity, high density, etc. None of that really matter for Bitcoin mining.
If your goal is low PUE then simply use typical evaporative cooling well known in chemical process engineering and refrigeration. Most of the required equipment is already available, all you'll need to do is bring a chemical/thermodynamic process engineer to the table with the PCB design engineer, who is already working for Spondoolies. Together they need to design a proper heat exchanger for the mining chips and the associated buck converters. I already asked Spondoolies if SP30 motherboard was designed for cutting into 15 smaller boards. Apparently not, probably because the PCB design engineer wasn't given this as a requirement. So they cut the heathsinks into 15 smaller pieces.
They need to conceptually invert that design: single large liquid heat exchanger and multitude of small PCBs hosting the hot chips is the way to go long term.
3M's profit margins on their immersion cooling fluids are so high, that they require scientific notation to fit in the spreadsheets. Just use common chilling/refrigeration equipment instead where the profit margins are in expressed in two digits.
We more or less agree with this analysis.
3M Novec surely could be cheaper, but what many people forget is that you only need a tiny little bit of it.
You can cool 4kW of hardware with 200cc or 6.8oz of fluid if you want (that's what's tested, surely not the limit). That costs less than my usual double espresso per kW or less than a pizza for the complete 4kW. I would prefer reducing my hardware to a simple chips on boards any time over creating your a heat exchanger or my own buck regulators and put it in bulky boxes with cables.
It's simple, really. Every facility you build has a price tag and its own set of pro and cons. Usually we compare cooling, and only on the device level, but there is much more than that to consider (power, labor, manufacturing etc).
DataTank Immersion (3M Novec):
<$0.65/W (
PUE 1.01) ->
$650/kWMineral Oil Cooling:
$3.14/W (
PUE 1.15)
Economizer (evaporative):
$7/W (
PUE 1.08) ->
FB $750/kWWater Cooling:
$10/W (
PUE 1.10)
Cheap air cooling:
$11/W (PUE 1.3-1.5? HK is
PUE 2.2!)
To put this in perspective, Titan has a PUE of 1.25 (25% of electricity go to cooling).
For you as hardware manufacturer, DataTank/Novec Immersion (<$0.65/W) has further advantages on the mining level:
- Includes power supplies, networking, everything required to start mining
- You don't need enclosures, heatsinks, assembly work, power supplies, all that
- I estimate that will make a 20% to 50% difference on manufacturing costs of your mining hardware
- You can ship your next hardware to the same customer in the same cheap form factor
- One single person can upgrade a whole container farm within hours
(ie. vs. how many palettes full of heavy 2U boxes that need to go into dozens and dozens of racks)
Facebook prides itself for paying $7500/kW ($210M total) for their Prineville data center in Oregon (it's a 28MW facility). It took them years to build, they have created thousands of jobs, and they evaporate 7 liters of water per kilowatt per day.
Ghetto Mining? Could we consider KNC as ghetto style considering it's scale? Rest assured it's probably not far from Facebook's pricing, after all the KNC site was built by the
same people that built Facebook's place (The Node Pole).
Here's some more info and an analysis of the KNC and other mines:
https://www.googledrive.com/host/0ByWHHc0u_thNMWtQeDNiT2duU0E/Analysis_of_Large-Scale_Bitcoin_Mining_Operations.pdfNaturally, businesses need to make money, so we are all getting charged what it costs plus some more. As a matter of fact, annual hosting costs are now exceeding the price of Bitcoin mining gear itself. Just check the
hosting thread and do some maths. And on top of that, you are paying for enclusures, shipping, labour, heatsinks, power supplies, all that. Some of it repeatedly if you are a long term miner.
Edit: if you are wondering, some of the above data is from here:
http://www.grcooling.com/data-center-cost-savings/http://blog.schneider-electric.com/datacenter/2012/02/16/how-much-should-a-modular-data-center-cost/
