Topic: [Announcement] Avalon ASIC Development Status [Batch #1] - page 42. (Read 155318 times)

A larger size than bASIC's 90nm, but smaller than ASICMINER's 130nm.  I don't believe any other ASIC makers have disclosed their process node size.

They've admitted to using a larger die size than their competitors. What else did you expect? The only consolation is being able to swap out to a more efficient PSU, and the fact that it doesn't need a host computer to run. Still, that GHs/1kUSD is nice for those of us with access to free electric.

While the price and performance is great, 400watts vs 60watts is far from competitive. Also a laptop will consume at most 30watts when mining hardware is attached, so it's strange that your all in one unit needs so much more.

I see you mention the power consumption will drop, but it needs to drop a lot.

+1

this would be true only in the case that the difficulty will remain unchanged for 5 months, and you know that it will not

real ROI will be, at best, somewhere at 8 months.

strictly speaking on power being the only variable I wouldn't even suggest to "mine-for-profit" basis with power rates higher than $0.10 ( and you are unable to get write offs or reductions. )

The real factor in the transition period of ASIC units will ultimately be delivery time, when difficulty is lower and the ROI is much higher.

Let's take this conservative example. using http://bitcoinx.com/profit/index.php

6 times the current difficulty
$.25 power cost.
400W
60GH/s

your break even time is 81 days, thats little over 2 month, of course assuming you can only maintain this ROI rate for 12 days or so, you would have effectively made 15% of your invest back.

with the current trend of everybody pushing their shipping date back I feel everybody has over estimated how quickly the difficulty will rise.

Let's assume Tom sold 1000 units, that's give or take 50TH/s,
Avalon only selling 300 units first batch, ~20TH.
BFL sells a crazy estimate of 2000 units, 120TH.

that barely adds up to 200THash, which is about 10 times the current network rate, and if difficulty goes up by a factor of ten using the same formula above. your ROI is 156 days.

honestly, it isn't that bad.

disclaimer: Avalon nor Yifu will be responsible for information provided here based an educated guess of future Bitcoin mining difficulty.

What do you think about this?
Especially as regards the European market, with electricity costs between $ 0.10-0.30/kwh

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1294453

Power consumption is quiet high If belives to BFL 6 times higher than their product.
There will be possibility to buy only chips? QFN package is simple to solder, and PCB design shouldn't be a problem. I have my own vision how rig should look like
I think that you may have many clients like me...

 

Finally...

Sounds great that you guys are leveling up the GH/s race. So far I think only Tom from bASIC might compete on this race. I guess the three letter company will ship with the specs they have set to date (60Gh/s).

How many workhorse chips do you have in this rig?

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Also it was a very nice touch for you guys to use open source code AND a standard power supply. Sounds like you guys thrive on open-ended innovation.

reserved.

Thanks for the transparency, but the unpackaged die size is what you ought to be posting.  Without that it's impossible to make performance comparisons (or at least those comparisons would have to assume it fills the whole package cavity, which portrays Avalon in the worst possible light).  Please provide the unpackaged die size.

Also, I think you may have neglected to say how many of these chips are in the 60GH/s device… or perhaps I missed that.  Anyways, without knowing how many chips are in the device, none of the information above is really useful.  Did you post this somewhere that I didn't see?



Interesting; an FO4 on TSMC 110nm is around 63ps, so at your 3.9ns cycle time (256mhz cycle rate) gives a datapath that is 62 FO4's deep.  Of course that doesn't mean there are 62 levels of logic!  Wire delays and clock skew (for chips that have clocks) come out of this budget too.

reserved.

Updating as promised,

Let's be frank. We ran into a potential delay of 4-7 days.

What does this mean?

We when taped out the chips to TSMC we had a "projected out date" of Jan 3, 2013 which is on schedule with our late dec. / early jan. demonstration dates. Now however after this week's website update our "projected out date" has changed to Jan 7th, 2013 and "committed date" has been revealed to be Jan 10th, 2013. TSMC did not give us a reason for this, but as a small customer you are really at the mercy of bigger customers running higher priority lots. e.g. "super hot lot"  The "committed date" is the promised date of delivery, it is very unusual for TSMC to break their "committed date", so we expect our chips to ship on or before Jan 10th, 2013.

Another potential problem is Customs clearing, the packaging company Fujitsu is located in Shanghai's Export Processing Zone (EPZ), while the packaging itself will not see delays, it may take an additional 2-3 days to clear Customs. To make up for this, if it occurs, we will be flying down to Shanghai to the demonstration in the EPZ instead of waiting for the shipping to the factory for assembly.

With all this happening, it has burned through the 1 week additional leeway time we originally left out. I must say it will be difficulty for us to ship on Jan 14th, we however expect to ship around Jan 18 ~ 20.

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Since some people were wondering how many chips are on a wafer earlier in the thread after we posted the MT forms I'll tell you, each wafer contains 4055 chips.

and this is the chip layout.

the purpose of this thread is to provide transparency and keep our existing and potential customers up-to-date whilst we work out some unforeseen website integration issues.

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Intro. Avalon launched with a challenge to our competitors: a over 50% dollar per GHash gain. Our competitors since then has also increased their specifications in order to stay competitive. Deviated from their original plan the competition managed to even the playing field, yet we simply proceeded with our original design goals and have reached 64Gh/s, and now 66Gh/s! Once again taking the lead in $/Ghash. While the competition promised early delivery dates but kept pushing them back. Avalon instead gave an very conservative estimate but now is scheduled to ship even earlier at Jan. 20th 2013.

Specification.
Avalon since inception has been designed to be an stand-alone unit, embed Linux openWRT equipped with WIFI capabilities and an Ethernet Port, while the competition is designed to operated over USB, depended on the need of a host computer. Continuing our trend, we have narrowed down our power estimates from 600W to 400W and this number is guaranteed to decrease further. Did I mention our power supply is a standard ATX?

The true genius of Avalon lies within its modular design. need a better PSU? No problem! Install your own. In fact, it is within our schedule to release the controller ( openWRT ) image.iso before the end of the year to give eager developers a head start to spin your own custom mining setups. Embrace open source!

Trade-Ins. Avalon believes in continuing the trust that have build up with our old customers. Reinstating our policy of $300 per Icarus, $400 per Lancelot, limited one FPGA trade-in per ASIC unit. The trade-in program will continue to be available and will apply to 1st-gen Avalons when the time comes.

Stress Testing. Avalon will not be testing these ASICs on the Bitcoin network period, whether it being the main-net, test-net, or even test-net-in-a-box. Why is that you may ask?

We will be testing these ASICs to do what exactly they are designed for, that is computing double-SHA256 hashes. this algorithm is not bitcoin exclusive at all. It is just so happens to be the block hashing algorithm, thus it would be silly to even set up a mining pool or use the bitcoin network in and form or way. We will be testing using our own custom software written to stress test our chips.

Shipping We at Avalon understands the some what unreliableness of EMS in certain countries, to address this issue, all existing and future orders will have the choice to be shipped out via DHL at no additional charge. This will ensure timely delivery of our products.

Inventory. Avalon learned from the mistake of our competitors and since conception has decided to release small order batches of 300 ( a number solely based on our estimated capacity) and only when a batch is close to finished, we will begin the sales of the next batch. When a new batch is announced, there will be another thread. In short, any units ordered so far, until further notice is part of batch #1, which is currently scheduled to ship at Jan 14th. In addition, as people fail to follow up with their orders, there are still some units left in the store, so if you missed your chance originally, now it's the time.

Facility Photos. Due to popular demand by the community, We have uploaded our facility photos. The full res album is at http://imgur.com/a/KPBTl


Retail Pricing.
$1,299? Yep, to stay with the spirit of the competition. $1,299 for 66Gh/s.

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question, comments and grievances welcome.