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Topic: Baikal Giant N - Cryptonight, Cryptonight-lite FPGA/ASIC miner - page 34. (Read 32830 times)

jr. member
Activity: 153
Merit: 2
I really wish people would stop calling FPGA's ASICs.  Baikal (so far) has only made FPGA mining rigs. ...
How can you tell the difference?
You probably can't without physically inspecting the chips used.
This is true, and besides that, the fact that Baikals can theoretically be flashed to hash other algorithms gives it away. The Baikal miners being FPGAs also meant that they were less efficient than the D3 X11 ASICS when the D3s first came out. FPGAs are typically weaker than ASICs.

As far as I know the Giant series have never actually been "upgraded" to support additional algorithms, is that right? I realize Baikal advertises the X10 as having that ability, but that's the only hint I've seen that they may be FPGAs. Seems to me like they're ASICs unless proven otherwise by an update from Baikal or possibly a decapping inspection by someone with the knowledge and equipment to do so.

They never upgrade. If the upgrade exists it will not be upgraded until it becomes less or not profitable to use it themselves.
jr. member
Activity: 94
Merit: 5
I have serious question here, why devs from cryptonight didn't fork algo months ago when they sense sudden hashrate increase.

It wasn't sudden, it was a slow roll since september,   I noticed it when i stopped mining monero back in october when the unknown mined blocks was only like 40% back then,  but it made monero far less profitable so i switched back to duel mining eth.  For the past 3 months Baikal has held it
at 75% of all the new blocks,  I guess they thought no one would notice.   They are only selling them now cause of the monero fork
coming in 2 weeks,  hopefully  the fork will make these miners worthless space heaters.
jr. member
Activity: 42
Merit: 25
I really wish people would stop calling FPGA's ASICs.  Baikal (so far) has only made FPGA mining rigs. ...
How can you tell the difference?
You probably can't without physically inspecting the chips used.
This is true, and besides that, the fact that Baikals can theoretically be flashed to hash other algorithms gives it away. The Baikal miners being FPGAs also meant that they were less efficient than the D3 X11 ASICS when the D3s first came out. FPGAs are typically weaker than ASICs.

As far as I know the Giant series have never actually been "upgraded" to support additional algorithms, is that right? I realize Baikal advertises the X10 as having that ability, but that's the only hint I've seen that they may be FPGAs. Seems to me like they're ASICs unless proven otherwise by an update from Baikal or possibly a decapping inspection by someone with the knowledge and equipment to do so.
full member
Activity: 378
Merit: 104
nvOC forever
This is total RIPOFF for all the GPU miners, these money mongers will do anything they possibly can to make the cryptos centralised.

Cryptonight is the only algo many small miners, like a PC holders are able to mine it, but these guys already made ASICS out of them, their agenda is simple, make rich richer.
newbie
Activity: 14
Merit: 0
What is most suspicious: "SEARIVER INDUSTRIAL LIMITED was incorporated on[ 03-OCT-2017 as a Private company limited"
So it's literally "just" created company. Maybe they are just avoiding taxes this way?
newbie
Activity: 42
Merit: 0
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).


Are you really sure that Baikals X10/B are FPGA? (Which FPGA, by the way?) While it is enterely possible, technical characteristics of these products are not typical for FPGA. Especially the low power consumption.

As for ROI I wouldn't expect good ROI from entry and mid-range FPGA boards because of their weak power supplys. We need propertly designed professional grade DC/DC for core voltage, that is rarely seen in practice.


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.)




If the Baikal Giant N is an FPGA that could resynthesize from a hardware update and be effective after the V7 Fork, then why are Baikal only selling them for $3600 per unit? And why are they no longer marketing them as being compatible with Monero? Is the public sale of these units weeks before the V7 fork just a coincidence? For DIY setups like you're talking about then FPGA is the only viable option, however, if you have millions to invest into mass production then the cost per unit to produce an ASIC is going to be much less than an FPGA.  Baikal have their own propriety development, they don't just make FPGAs, they make multi algo ASICS. 

Also, from the  2018-03-04 Dev meeting:

12:22 PM somebody made an FPGA
12:22 PM but ASICs...?
12:22 PM <@fluffypony> somebody taped out an ASIC
12:22 PM when did this happen?
12:22 PM the reddit post you mean ?
12:22 PM link?
12:22 PM <@fluffypony> sidechannelled to me, not public
12:22 PM <@fluffypony> a handful of others have had similar confirmation via via
12:22 PM @fluffypony: are this ASICS or FPGAs?
12:23 PM <@fluffypony> were it just me I would find it suspicious
12:23 PM <@fluffypony> psychocrypt: ASICs, not FPGAs
sr. member
Activity: 966
Merit: 359
👉MINING-BIOS.eu💲⛏
I have serious question here, why devs from cryptonight didn't fork algo months ago when they sense sudden hashrate increase.
Monero hardforks are every 6 months...
so will baikal update every 6 months to match monero?
They haven't respond if they wil update firmware. If it's FPGA it should be possible.
We still need to wait for final algo changes, I saw some changes on XMR-STAK PR from someone, but Monero team probably haven't released anything final.

Edit: XMRig accept PR and made needed changes for the algo change.
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 255
I have serious question here, why devs from cryptonight didn't fork algo months ago when they sense sudden hashrate increase.
Monero hardforks are every 6 months...
so will baikal update every 6 months to match monero?
sr. member
Activity: 966
Merit: 359
👉MINING-BIOS.eu💲⛏
I have serious question here, why devs from cryptonight didn't fork algo months ago when they sense sudden hashrate increase.
Monero hardforks are every 6 months...
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 255
i am not buying unless they bring down price and remove MOQs
newbie
Activity: 96
Merit: 0
I have serious question here, why devs from cryptonight didn't fork algo months ago when they sense sudden hashrate increase.
full member
Activity: 364
Merit: 106
ONe Social Network.
Nobody is buying these, the algos are changing soon so will make this an expensive doorstop. Not good news for Baikal, maybe they didn't know about it.
They know more then you can imagine

everybody buying this is just financing their next batch to fuck up cryptonight v7
full member
Activity: 714
Merit: 104
Nobody is buying these, the algos are changing soon so will make this an expensive doorstop. Not good news for Baikal, maybe they didn't know about it.
They know more then you can imagine
full member
Activity: 241
Merit: 100
To Hash or not to Hash, that's what the question
Interesting turnaround with these miners...looks like an infinite battle of good vs evil Cool cant wait to see results of XMR fork, which apparently will happen within days.
newbie
Activity: 69
Merit: 0
ETN team working very "fast"
While ETN change their algo all asics morally obsoleted
if they can't do it themselves then they will hire guy that works on monero fork
newbie
Activity: 50
Merit: 0
The ones who know more: Is it possible to reprogram FPGA everytime some fork occurs with Cryptonight algo and thus still keep mining? Or cannot it be done?

It is technically possible to reprogram FPGA, and the V7 POW function is almost  same as older one.
So new bitstream should update FPGA, but the question is will this bitstream be released and when it will happen.

BTW old X6500, ztex and others can mine altcoins with profit.

Thx for bringing that up, I totally forgot about the X6500rev3 and 2 versions.  Makes me wonder about other "asic resistant" algo's out there...only matter of time for FPGA and Asic?

Take a look at MagiCoin with their m7m hashing algo, asic's would be useless there. Also there's Verium, mineable only with CPU's, no GPU's because of the huge amount of RAM it requires to launch the miner. It uses scryptN algo. Developing and asic for these kind of coins would cost a load of money, that's why these coins are trully decentralized.
jr. member
Activity: 504
Merit: 3
In the same situation but they have negotiation with SIA developers ..

So in theory better... Also no moq @nd lower buying price. The A3 is $1600 now right?
jr. member
Activity: 182
Merit: 2
In the same situation but they have negotiation with SIA developers ..
newbie
Activity: 6
Merit: 0
Where can be the Baikal-n be bought? Do you think it's still profitable?

For 15 Days you can have $20 / day but after you can use it as doorstop as you will not be able to mine something.
Good job BAIKAL
So if you wanna make a gift to baikal go on and buy  Grin Grin Grin Grin Grin

What about the a3? Is it better?
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