Topic: ASICMiner BE300S Samples Arrived, <0.2W/G Achieved at Board Level - page 13. (Read 66449 times)

Possibly. You still need to know the ratio of silicon to other system parts costs. If a $100 miner is made up of $1 worth of chips, and $99 worth of other parts, doubling the cost of the chips only makes the miner cost $101. Unfortunately I don't know how much the raw chips cost to know if it significant or not relative to total system cost. The silicon could be a significant portion of the total system cost by now. It didn't used to be.

while the power numbers are certainly good, there are two questions i'd have.

the main goal when doing bitcoin mining is balancing the capital cost and the operational cost.

the capital cost can to a large extent by expressed as a performance/density figure, GH/MM, and the operational cost expressed as a Power figure W/GH/S (aka J/GH).  the remaining system costs (fans, power supplies, pcbs etc.. are largely constant regardless of the silicon used, so the main factor is efficiency and cost of the silicon itself)

clearly, many designers are working on asics that run at low voltages and thus achieve a headline low power figure.

The key is to achieve LOW POWER, while at the same time, ensuring that the silicon cost is low.

So it looks like the nominal performance of the be300 chip is somewhere between 3 and 6 GH/s (or 2.8 to 7.2 gh/s) per package.
And we've been told the package size is a 5x5mm square.   Since we havnt been told the die size... lets try and guess.  clearly its nowhere near 5x5 mm... so perhaps its 3x3 (=9 mm) or 4x4 (=16 mm)?

it makes a difference how big the die area is, as the gigahashes per mm need to be significantly better than last year's asics if its to be competitive in 2015.   it needs to be above 3 GH/mm to be competitively priced, and ideally north of 5 gh/mm.  And if... completely guessing... the die is... lets say its a 2.5 x 2.5mm, (= 6.25mm) then its going to be lower than 1 GH/mm, and thus will be expensive compared to other competitors coming out in 2015.   Bear in mind that last year's chips were all above 1 gh/mm, also in the tsmc 28nm process.  this year's ones should be significantly more efficient in order to bring down the cost of mining.

You're missing the point. There are 4 variables, not 2. W/GH, GH/chip and $/GH [and so $/chip]. In order to maximise $/chip, GH/chip will be raised much higher for a retail product than you see in those tests. That in turn, increases W/GH.

I'm not saying the chips can't achieve those lower W/Gh, I'm just saying don't be disappointed when the products based on those chips aren't .25W/GH. [This is of course ignoring that chip W/GH also isn't = to product W/GH.]

And looks like real performance of samples is better than predicted:

According to previous updates, the production chips would have have greater efficiency:


So, why are you assuming that they will be less efficient?

No, no they're not. Its just the test range displayed is at the very low end of the chip to demonstrate best W/Gh. The actual release W/GH will be significantly higher, as will the GH/chip. But even at .25 at chip, there are already chips that can achieve that at low clock speeds, and many more to come.

yes, agreed, way OT. apologies, my brain often goes off on a tangent and i find it difficult to stop thinking... i'm hoping that one day it solves a block.
 

A Bitcoin mining cartel? I like the way your thinking on that.   And I think we're overdue for one.   They could fix the supply as well as the price...   I think we're off topic at this point though.  

I have some miners in my house acting as space heaters to help with the heating bill.  Once spring comes and the miners are no longer profitable (better to buy the coins), I probably won't buy many large ones because of the dual cost of electricity and cooling.

anufacturers working together to fall under some kind of Game theory model.  This would be interesting to discuss though.   I doubt it will happen.  Human greed is always present.  If I can buy more of these chips to 'print money' for myself, why wouldn't I?  Short term gains are, for the most part, more important than long terms gains for many people. 

i concur.

But therein could lie another issue, with spring comes the warmer climate in a lot of the world. it's going to be a very interesting time when it comes to deployment.
I, for one think that it's time all manufacturers should be working in tandem, working together to assure their own profits... the pulling ahead by any great margin by any one could cause problems for the entire network. To be fair, difficulty can be commanded as I believe we are currently seeing with what you comment on regarding difficulty remaining pretty stagnant is something which should be worked on by all. I want every miner to make their profits, and to ensure this, I feel that some form of collaboration between manufacturers is going to be required. what is your take on this?

I agree.

The spring will be an interesting time for sure.  I hope FC and AM build a decent size self mine with their cheap power in China.

Right now we are looking at the 2nd difficulty that will +/- 1% or so.  So that would suggest that mining has reached an equilibrium with price for the current generation of chips.  I fear that if price doesn't increase, not many people would be willing to purchase new chips.

i think we are getting ahead of ourselves a little. on-paper specs show these chips to be ~2-3x more efficient than the next competitor chips, but while competitors do not have the requirement to release their own specs, then by the time these are baked and ready, that ~2-3x will certainly not be the case.
then we have every h/w manufacturer on the planet vying to build 500TH/s rigs which in turn puts difficulty way up to a level where no mining is profitable.
we are approaching times where manufacturers will need to remain cautious. Super-efficient chips are all very well, but they still have to sell them to a market who are looking for profit.

I disagree.

These chips are ~2-3x more efficient than the next competitor's chips. With mining margins very thin, if you can get 2-3x the hashrate with the same electricity cost, why wouldn't you?  Of course, the price needs to be competitive as well.

the problem therein lies that mid range miners, like USB stick miners are pretty much novelty items now. Sales volume won't command the demand on build investments, and making power bricks is just more manufacturing expense.
I do believe however, that there is no requirement to build humongous large-power miners with such efficient chips. FC would do better to keep product under 4TH/s... even that is a good home mining rig at these efficiencies and which can also be deployed in a farm setting.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I like the idea of building a simple brick-powered introductory miner with USB connection. Something a n00b can buy, inexpensive but reasonably efficient and not requiring advanced computer knowledge or miscellaneous hardware stashes to use and maintain. Just saying, Dogie's not the only one thinking it. I've always said there wasn't enough (or good-enough) hardware in the mid-range consumer sector between USB stick miners and farm-grade hardware.

I haven't tried them, but there are a number of GUIs available for BFGMiner (yes, including BFL's EasyMiner - which should work for any supported device).

Yes, I agree. I miss the days of even GUIMiner.

1)You are the first person to have suggested that this is a beginners device in this thread - One other person used the term introductory.
2)Shouting - the use of capital letters.
3)Yes the ones on Amazon that you get commission on that people said failed after a short time.

You have made a number of loud negative remarks in this thread showing a lack of respect for other people's opinions.
This time you use bold type to emphasise your opinions.
The discussion in this thread has been about obtaining samples, making boards, FETs, power supply efficiency.
You are out of order Dogie

Let's keep this to talk about engineering and assuming a level of competence.

Well for new people to mining having to use cgminer could be a little confusing. I am not saying fork anything just have a front end for it that is simple.

There would be no need to create a GUI if the driver support was provided to CKolivas and merged with mainbranch CGMiner instead of creating another fork that gets abandoned 3 months later too never be updated again like what Rockxie has done over at Rockminer.