Topic: [Announcement] Avalon ASIC Development Status [Batch #1] - page 27. (Read 155335 times)

Avalon still on schedule for Jan 14?

it is a SCAM...........
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.839374

Those are pictures of the Bitforce single.

Doesn't Avalon have their own forum site, like the other vendors?  You might have better luck there.

I can't remember the site offhand...

Heh, weird. The board and the coolers seem like BFL.

I guess someone got the last laugh....

https://www.bitmit.net/en/item/11120-intratech-asic-miner-aerius-x1-35-gh-s

I think they use actual means of communication for official updates. I remember seeing some emails come through at some point...

Doesn't Avalon have their own forum site, like the other vendors?  You might have better luck there.

I can't remember the site offhand...

Good luck with that, even the moderator can't.

Dream on, you'll need a 60w unit to achieve that, but it would happen in half a day.
For a 400w Avalon, at $0.10 a kwh that's 9.6kw a day = $0.96 x 365 = $350.40 a year.
So not even at today's difficulty "they will be able to pay off the year of electricity use in less than a day". More like 3 days, IF you strike blocks as any mining calculator suggests. Which no-one will.
At 4x difficulty that's 11 days for the power (at $0.10/kwh) and 40 weeks for the device. If the difficulty stays a 4x, which it won't.

Enough profit so that even at 400watts they will be able to pay off the year of electricity use in less than a day. Thats IF, it stays at 400watts by the next update. Which should be soon I hope.

Sounds like damage control to me. BFL/Josh has come a long way from "kill-em-all jet fighter pilot first ASICs on the market nuke everyone else rarara" to "OK we might not be the first ones but it does not matter ... OK we suck but everyone else sucks too".

Lame, seriously lame.

Oh! I am sure that at least here BFL will be the first one! The first one to use the "unusual long Chinese New Year"-story as another excuse why they can't ship their ASICs

... resulting in a net increase in network hashing power between 5 - 10 TH by my estimations.  So even if Avalon shipped tomorrow, it would not throw difficulty out of whack too far ...

...before Avalon runs into Chinese New Year and everything is on hold for a month...

So I have been very focused on our ASIC launch for the past few weeks obviously and have not given a lot of thought towards the overall climate / state of ASICs until this evening, whilest rooting a new Nexus 7 GSM model (it's still got that new Android smell)...

A few things occurred to me, after giving them some thought and I am just throwing this out here:

bASIC

The lack of information from Tom (which was endemic from the start, but people had blinders on for a number of reasons), coupled with the little bit of information he's given out points quite convincingly that he has basically gone back to the drawing board and is starting over from scratch, or close enough to it to make no difference.  Why this has happened, only Tom can say, but one can make a few educated guesses.  There are two likely scenario's I can see here, and I'm just speculating... but either the "team" that Tom had assembled never delivered anything but empty promises and Tom finally got fed up and switched teams, putting him at square one.  Another possibility is that he did in fact get some boards back and things just didn't work out like he was hoping, which means he had to go back to the drawing board.  I give equal credence to either issue, but the fact that he has absolutely nothing to show for the efforts indicates that he is either starting from scratch or never got off the ground to begin with.  In either case, a mid-January launch from Tom at this point is exceedingly unlikely, and if he does manage to get something out by the middle of January, I suspect it will underperform and the power consumption will be much more than he's indicated at this point.  I think he was basing his power and hashrate estimates off what his previous team was telling him, and he's all but admitted that previous team was useless... so any estimates coming from them are going to be suspect.  Right now, I would say out of all the ASIC vendors, Tom is the most likely to fold up shop if anyone is going to fold up.

Avalon

Avalon is like the turtle... slow and steady and they will eventually get there.  What you end up with is going to be large, loud and hot while it tears through kilowatts like a Silverback through a banana plantation.  Will it perform at the hashrate advertised?  Absolutely, I think they will nail that, but the cost to reach that performance at 110nm is going to be crippling to anyone but those with free power.  The fact that the Avalon team has publicly stated that anyone not using free power should not be mining should be a major red flag when it comes to people who have to pay for power and what Avalon is going to bring to the table.  This is to say nothing of the environmental cost and how irresponsible it is to advocate mining inefficiently and not caring about the power usage.  Having brought up the environmental issue, I do realize how potentially hypocritical it is to be a bitcoin miner and talk about the environmental impact of mining, but that doesn't it isn't and shouldn't be a concern, especially when alternates are available.  Even the bASIC as a worst case will be superior to the Avalon in terms of power usage and should be used before using an Avalon unit to mine... but the environmental impact is another discussion. 

I think Avalon is going to run into some integration issues with their all-in-one approach that they aren't expecting - how quickly they will overcome them is anyones guess, but it could potentially signal a delay, but it's not something I would bet for or against.

ASICMINER

What's going on here?  Last I heard they might have chips before the end of the year.  Their hashrate won't really affect the network as a whole very much, so it's not really an issue.

----

I think that about covers the leading ASIC scene apart from BFL.  That said, with Tom looking like he's either down for the count or severely delayed, the real race now seems to be between Avalon and BFL.  We are still on target to ship before Avalon, so that is not really an issue... but I was considering what would happen if Avalon pulled a slick one and was able to ship much earlier and something interesting occurred to me.

Avalon has 300 units they want to ship in the first batch - ok, at 66 GH/s, that increases the network hashrate about 20 TH... That is less than half the current network hashrate, which is comprised of a large portion of GPU miners.  Adding 20 TH to the network would knock many of those GPU miners out of the profitability envelope, resulting in a net increase in network hashing power between 5 - 10 TH by my estimations.  So even if Avalon shipped tomorrow, it would not throw difficulty out of whack too far and would not be catastrophic for any of the other ASIC companies.  If Avalon sticks to their timeline and is truly able to ship all 300 units in a reasonable time frame, the network hashrate would be affected only in a minor way before Avalon runs into Chinese New Year and everything is on hold for a month...  That means the total increased network hashrate between now and March (at the earliest) is 5 - 10 TH if no other ASICs ship.  This does not necessarily include ASICMiner, but the future of ASICminer is kind of murky at this point, so it's hard to predict where they will end up and what effect it will have.

Are you sure? 65nm is pretty cool to the touch, just saying.  

No, BFL has more experience in making highly efficient popcorn poppers.

That's not what it says, and if that IS the case then they should fire that person immediately...they've failed.