Topic: Anyone demonstrated a 28nm ASIC mining bitcoin yet? (Read 2446 times)

I would venture to say that HashFast's implementation of 28nm process is not as good as it gets, and is more of a race to the market type design.

I think Cointerra will beat them in electrical efficiency judging by their resumes. "CoinTerra boasts a highly experienced engineering team of semiconductor architects and designers who have previously designed some of the world’s highest performance CPUs, GPUs and chipsets for NVIDIA, Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm and Nortel. Having worked on several generations of low-power mobile devices, our team brings tremendous experience in power efficient circuitry, design methodology and implementation to the exciting new frontier of Bitcoin mining. "

They are claiming "significantly less than a watt per Gh/s" on their 28nm product.

I guess it all depends on how "good" existing designs are.  Taking HF just because they provided die size, hashrate and power info.


Reported power consumption (at the chip) is 400 GH / 250 W = 1.6 GH/W.

So HF claims their silicon is good for 1.23 GH/mm^2 and 1.6 GH/W @ 28nm.  
While they are impressive compared to 65nm tech it remains to be seen how "good" those are compared to what is possible for 28nm tech.  Are they very good, or barely adequate in the grand scheme of things?  

If the run some simulations on an improved die and it shows to only be marginally better (say 1.4 GH/mm2  and 1.8 GH/W) then I agree the chip probably won't be made before moving to a smaller process. On the other if they came up with say >2.0 GH/mm^2 and >3 GH/W) it may make sense to produce a second 28nm chip.   I just wonder how much improvement is possible,  I guess once we get a couple of vendors with real 28nm silicon we should have a better idea.

Just responding to say that I agree on all points. I imagine the first 28nm designs may be more safe than elegant to minimize risk, leaving performance on the table. 2014 will be exciting, 2015 maybe not so much.

I can't find any demonstrated hashing output and power consumption examples for Bitfury, only claims 

I guess it all depends on how "good" existing designs are.  Taking HF just because they provided die size, hashrate and power info.


Reported power consumption is 400 GH / 250 W = 1.6 GH/W.

So HF claims 1.23 GH/mm^2 and 1.6 GH/W @ 28nm.  It remains to be seen how "good" those are for 28nm.  Are they very good, or barely adequate?

If their simulations show an improved version is only marginally better (say 1.4 GH/mm2  and 1.8 GH/W) I agree it wouldn't make sense to try and squeeze out more efficient chips.  On the other hand say >2.0 GH/mm^2 and >3 GH/W) are possible.   Once we get multiple vendors with stats based on real silicon we can start to get a better idea of relative efficiency.

I'm not so sure there will be that many incremental changes made to chips once they start to hit the process limit. I say this as I expect the margins on chips to become so slim that it would be financial ruin to invest in the NRE for another 28nm chip once you already have one.

One 18x18mm die is able to do 400 GHash (nominal - more overclocked**)
   Hashing per square mm:
      18x18mm = 324mm^2
      400 GHash / 324mm^2 = 1.23 GHash/mm^2

@Gomeler

Agreed on both points.  Design matters and we won't be moving past 28nm for a while. 

As for design there is something horribly broke in BFL design and I can't see them doing a significant redesign at this point.  Bitfury and BFL aren't the only two with vastly different efficiencies at the same scale.  Granted both of these are vaporware at this point but I find it interesting that Hashfast is reporting ~0.6W/GH (at the chip) and KNC is reporting >2W/GH (at this chip) and both of them are on a 28nm process.  We will see when it gets to real silicon but if true that is significant. 

As for next gen.  We won't be seeing anything smaller than 28nm.  22nm is cost prohibitive and you are looking at huge NRE.  By the time it becomes possible the market will be flooded.  I do think there will be incremental improvements on the same process (the "tock" in Intel tick tock strategy).   There is also a troubling trend which Nvidia highlighted a while back in that the cost per transistor isn't going down much even when processes become mature so the smart money may be on optimization. 

The 110/130nm tech is going to be obsolete very soon.  I don't mean people won't be able to mine with them I just mean nobody is going to be able to sell new units.  If AsicMiner and Avalon are going to stay in the game they will be forced to make a move to 55nm if not 28nm.  When everyone is on the same process it is going to come down to design, system optimization, larger runs to reduce incremental cost, and having a solid supply chain.  It will be interesting.   I don't think every company that is around today will still be around a year from now.

Without getting into BFL's 28nm plans, it's boggling how their 65nm design is eating 4w/GH even after their epic development time, whereas this 55nm design is well under 1w/GH and seems to have come out of no where.

BFL is predicting their 28nm chips will use barely less W/GH than BitFury's 55nm chips, when they should be at least 3x better than BitFury, if their design was as good. BitFury's 28nm chips (if they plan to do that) ought to be awesome.

0.7 W/GH? on a 55nm chip? Impressive.

0.7 W/GH? on a 55nm chip? Impressive.

Nice video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYyrNhLwrn0

I can't find any demonstrated hashing output and power consumption examples for Bitfury, only claims 

I can't find any demonstrated hashing output and power consumption examples for Bitfury, only claims 

Bitfury has the smallest demonstrated chip at 55 nm.

Try once not to avoid the topic in question.

Try for once not to be a dick.

KNC sock puppet avoids the serious question and posts stupid link. If you wanted to show that 28nm is possible, why wouldn't you have mentioned the current and past 22nm intel chips a lot of us are using?

Ah yes, because you 10000% blindly believe in KNC.

tldr: Answer is no.

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