Topic: Baikal Giant N - Cryptonight, Cryptonight-lite FPGA/ASIC miner - page 33. (Read 32808 times)

I would take it serious coming from them.  They are here to conpete with the likes of bitmain they best keep producing asic for all algos.  Just because something isn’t cost efficient when you run your numbers doesn’t mean it doesn’t work out for someone else.  

BR

And just like that, Baikal Giant N is obsolete now.

They have a MOQ of 6, so...

6 x $3600 each = $21,600 total

6 x 20kH/s each = 120kH/s total

Ships in 7 days.



Now Antminer X3, 200kH/s for $12,000. Shipping 15-31 May.

That's a little over $10,000 difference and half of the hash rate.


Now if you think the Baikal Giant N will make $10,000+ between now and 15-31 May, then I guess Baikal Giant N will make sense, but sense that's just a unicorn dream. There will be absolutely no reason anymore to buy the Baikal Giant N.

Their greed shot themselves in the foot with their overpricing and MOQ.


So who ever did buy the Giant N, ouch...

There is nothing suspicious about the Giant-N.  I was already working on an FPGA cryptonight miner before the Giant-N was announced (and obviously I am now focusing on other algorithms).  The power of 60W is realistic for one FPGA accessing many external SRAM's.  Unlike DRAM, SRAM consumes very little power.  The fundamental nature of Cryptonight is that it uses almost no number crunching (by design).  A single FPGA just accesses many parallel SRAM's and these memory accesses do not consume a great deal of power.  FPGA's consume way less power than other mining devices already.  Consider the X10 burns 250-500W and makes the same amount per day as a 2000W GPU rig.  Some algorithms burn more, some burn less, and algorithms that have no number crunching (like Cryptonight) burn the least.  The reason a Vega 56/64 burns so much power on cryptonight is because it is using high bandwidth external memory, a totally different approach than using many SRAM's in parallel.

FPGA's can be reconfigured very quickly.  It is true that certain PCB designs and part selections are better at some algorithms than others.  But it doesn't matter if Monero does a hard fork, you can still just use an FPGA to mine the new algorithm, ad infinitum.  As I mentioned before, only Ethash is truly resistant to FPGA's.  As Baikal has more and more FPGA miners on the market with different types of FPGA's and RAM (Giant-B, X10, Giant-N), a coin which 'forks' would have to know the exact internal configuration of every FPGA mining rig on the market to 'avoid' a new algorithm which could be efficiently mined by them.  To give an example, there is a decent chance that Monero's new algorithm could be (accidentally) mineable by the Giant-B or Giant-X10 or Giant-N, and all Baikal has to do is release new bitstreams (firmware for the SD card) that would update those rigs to mine the new algorithm.

As the number of different FPGA rigs on the market continues to increase, it would be very difficult to fork to an algorithm that would be immune to those rigs, unless you pick an Ethash style algorithm.  Furthermore if you add in all the cheap FPGA boards available from companies like Digikey, Avnet, Xilinx and Intel, then there is ALREADY a mass produced FPGA board that can do any algorithm efficiently except Ethash.

FYI the Monero ASIC statement is specific to ASIC's.  They specifically say they want to avoid ASICs mining their coin (they speak of FPGA's more favorably, and separately from ASICs).  Since the Giant-N is an FPGA rig, it doesn't actually fall into the category of something they would fork away from.  Furthermore, the Giant-N hash rate is not devastating to GPU's.  It has a slightly better ROI than Vega's, but in no way do Vega's become obsolete.  Baikal would have to ship out 100,000 Giant-N's to truly disrupt the Cryptonight networks, which is unlikely.

(BTW I bought 2 Giant-N from a local reseller in Vancouver.  The units are supposed to arrive on Monday.)

just received mail from Bitmain  

We are proud and happy to announce that we are launching the all-new Antminer X3, a new Antminer model for mining cryptocurrencies based on the hashing algorithm CryptoNight.

The Antminer X3 delivers a minmum hashrate of 220KH/s while consuming 550W of total power.

To prevent hoarding by certain users or resellers and to ensure that more individual miners in different time zones around the world are able to order this new ASIC miner, we have made some changes:

There is a limit of one miner per user for all orders in the current (two) batches.
We will release both these batches with an equal stock thrice today: at 3PM, 6pm and 9PM (15 March, GMT+8). >

I really wish people would stop calling FPGA's ASICs.  Baikal (so far) has only made FPGA mining rigs.  There is a huge difference between an FPGA and an ASIC.  An FPGA is not that much different from a GPU.  Anyone can get one.  Anyone can buy a Zynq FPGA board from digikey for $89-$199, or a higher end one for more money, and if you take a little while to learn how to program it, you can hash any algorithm except equihash & ethash.  Furthermore, your ROI will be better than a GPU in almost every case, in some cases dramatically better (as Baikal showed with the X10 and Giant-B).

ASIC's on the other hand are NOT available to everyone.  First you need the software (Synopsys, which costs $500K), then you need at least $3 million USD for the first batch of chips (assuming you can find a billion dollar fab that wants to run your project), and most likely the first revision fails and needs at least another $3 million for another revision.

So:
CPU's + GPU's + FPGA's = available for everyone, can be programmed by anyone with extremely low cost or free tools
ASIC = extremely expensive and not feasible for an individual

I'm working on my own FPGA rig and I suggest other people do the same.  It also allows you to stay ahead of the curve, especially on smaller altcoins.  Baikal is good at making FPGA mining equipment, good for them.  Embrace change and advancement. 

And for those who are wondering, 60W for 20,000 hash on Cryptonight is absolutely feasible for a single FPGA with multiple external SRAM's.

And for those who want to develop their own FPGA rigs, make sure to analyze the algorithm(s) you want to implement, and choose the best board for the task in terms of the amount of internal memory the FPGA has vs. the amount of logic cells & DSP slices.

Which FPGA do you think would run Cryptonight the best?