A lot of people have asked me about the FPGA rig that I am building, and make a long story short, I am hoping eventually to release bitstreams for a couple of very common FPGA boards; in this fashion, the average person can just buy one to 30 of these 'stock' FPGA boards, connect them to their PC by USB cables and PCIe-to-USB3 cards, and start mining with the publicly available bitstreams for a 2% fee. The ROI on high end FPGA boards right now is 15 to 90 days depending on the algorithm and the board. This setup is almost immune to 'forking', and in my opinion, GPU's will gradually be replaced by FPGA's and I believe stock-hardware FPGA mining with publicly available bitstreams will replace the current set up of stock-GPU's with publicly available mining software.
When the transition from GPU's to FPGA's is complete, true-ASIC rigs will not be that attractive. They will offer only a moderate hash rate increase, for high risk.
Very very interested. When will you have them ready? And where is it possible to buy those high end fgpa? Thanks!
Other than myself I know of at least two other people who are also working on open-platform FPGA rigs, which means in reality there must be even more than that. Likely several will be released around the same time.
High end cards are available from digikey.com, avnet.com, hitechglobal.com, bittware.com, xilinx.com. The lowest end card that can ROI in around 30 days is the $490 Digilent Nexys Video [Xilinx XCA7200T] (available from Digilent.com, Avnet.com, Digikey.com). However, the Nexys card is limited in which algorithms you can mine, and personally I believe the future of open platform FPGA rigs is in the high end cards which can run almost every altcoin algorithm. The high end cards cost around $4K to $6K each, which is around the same price of custom mining rigs, with much better ROI's, more flexibility, and none of the 'screw-you-over' attitude of the big mining companies. With full open access to your own hardware, there are no 'secret' or 'locked' algorithms which are out of your control.
I'm working full time on this project, I might have something publicly available by June or July.
I forked tpruvot's CPU miner, the miner works the same on the command line, with -a specifying the algorithm, and the PC mining software loads the correct bitstream into the FPGA card right before you start mining. If you want to run profit switching, the software just reconfigures the FPGA in a few seconds and then switches algorithms.
The other tremendous gain is the low power consumption. A high end FPGA card burns around 150-200W and makes $40 to $270 per day. Which means you can 'live' off mining revenue without a complicated cooling system, 220V circuits, and all the other headaches of GPU's.
Very interesting indeed, thanks for sharing. I have a few questions, but for folks doing searches, the correct part for the Nexys is XC7A200T
So, on to the questions, and please correct me wherever my assumptions are wrong; not an expert in FPGA by an means.
1. The low-end fpga in your example, seems to only come with 512MB 800MHz DDR3, which also means that it would not be able to mine algos that require 2GB of memory or more, correct?
2. Do you have a few high-end fpga example boards to link to?
3. Do you have a working proof-of-concept, what algo is it running, on which board, and is it stable?
4. Further to #3 above, what are the temperatures like at full blast?
it seem to be able to buy three at the price of two.
