Topic: Baikal Giant N - Cryptonight, Cryptonight-lite FPGA/ASIC miner - page 36. (Read 32808 times)

That isn't the official ETN page...

Yeah I'm counting with ETN mining

ETN team working very "fast"
While ETN change their algo all asics morally obsoleted

They're obviously trying to get rid of stock/make sales.  They finally responded to my email that I sent them 2 months ago for the Giant B w/their generic email with prices for all their products.

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?

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.

The hashrate for SIA increased when bitmain shipped, not a day before. We were carefully monitoring it. See for example https://siastats.info/mining

That is not official it is a fan pleading with ETN to fork (also ETN take ages to make dev changes in the past)

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?

And ETN will fork to V7
https://twitter.com/electroneuminfo/status/973182832959946757

So this miner is useless.

Very slim chance, they haven't even released the promised 2 new algos for x10 and that miner came out couple of months ago.

Most likely there will be no firmware update for Giant N, and they will release a Giant N #2 miner to make more money from people after they done mining. LOL.

I am currious why people think that baikal wont just reprogram their FPGA or even make new ones and mine with them when monero fork?They did it once and mined with them for more then 3 months without coming out with machines why not do the same again....

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.)

Asics dont do 2 different algos, Cryptonight and Cryptonight-lite. They are very similar but are they exactly the same, no. Baikal do FGGA , why would they change now.

I know right? This has been bugging me for the past two days... is it a FPGA is it an ASIC are the specs correct is it an exit scam...

We'll just have to wait and see if/when someone gets one of these and opens it up.

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.

You rock! Always thought about trying a FPGA but never took it seriously. I have background in working with embedded systems. Is it possible to give some starting points or hints? Thanks!