Topic: [BitCentury] Metabank 120Gh 65nm Pre-Order Proxy [CLOSED] - page 8. (Read 79010 times)

thanks for the news, really looking forward to you announcement!

I call dibs if its a miner based on bitfury chips at reasonable price. 

Correct. Sorry we recently stopped accepting wait list requests and changed the thread subject back to what it was originally "Metabank pre-oders ", we should probably change it to something more relevant to where we are at now to minimize confusion. We are not taking any more Metabank pre-orders at this time, as Metabank has not announced any more units for sale.  

As for the status of our previous Metabank orders, as has already been stated, Metabank has said they have not experienced any delays so far, but a more specific target delivery date has not been provided, they are still touting: Aug-Oct 2013.  

To provide a bit more clarity, once asic chips are in hand (and we know they have had them for about a month now at least, certainly before us), it can take several weeks to a couple of months to have a PCB designed from scratch. This depends of course on schematic and layout engineer experience, on complexity of the board, thermals/voltage/performance targets/error rates, amongst many other things. Then after design is finished, ideally access to PCB printing manufacturer is immediately available and depending on how many layers the PCB will have, whether it is double sided or not, what type of alloys are required, size of PCB and especially how many units need to be produced, this impacts PCB manufacturing time, but generally speaking it can be as little as 3-5 days upwards of a couple of weeks. Next comes the assembly process where ASICs and dozens of other components are put on the PCB boards. This is typically a 3-10 day process depending on similar factors - volume of boards needing assembly and inventory availability to all the dozens of components required to be put on the board are critical. If assembly company is missing 1 component it can delay things for a week or two easily. Lastly comes the external metal case design & milling and volume production which itself can also take a few weeks, although in theory it can be done in parallel to other processes, but can only be assembled after a PCB has been fully completed (PCB printing+PCB assembly). All in all, assuming Metabank had test alpha chips in mid June, August would be very ambitious date but not impossible, Sept should be realistic, and October should allow them some extra time in case at least 1 flaw was found and re-design had to take place which means going back to step 1 but only a couple of weeks to fix a design flaw instead of upwards of 2 months of starting from scratch.  In short, it is a relatively complex process, involving many many steps, requiring a wide range of skills sets and nearly always involving several 3rd parties who don't always meet their initial stated timelines - as has been evidenced by just about every single company out there trying to develop and sell ASIC mining gear.

While the above is a general idea of how things progress, actual timelines regarding where Metabank is at are entirely speculative at this point as  Metabank has not been very forward with where exactly they are.

On the news front, we are working on some really exciting stuff in the background that we will hopefully be able to announce in a few short weeks, but we can't really disclose any specifics right now (don't you just love cliff hangers?).

Cheers!
Luis

Yes and no. I once asked Bitfury the very same question. Here's his paraphrased response:

GDS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDSII

I think you missed it already. Pre-orders were a few weeks ago, I think they were sold out a few days after.

When are they opening orders for their products?

Nice...

Shouldn't your subject line be modified to say 55nm?

Here is a video of the BitFury ASIC running:
https://bitcentury.io/blog/bitfury-asic-in-action

Much of the information is still undetermined at this time. The suppliers are still awaiting testing results (from bitfury, and alpha testers such as ourselves). Though preliminary results appear that 2-2.5 will be the operational range of the chip. It will likely be that the units will contain somewhere around 60 chips each. We will know more once we're able to conduct a full battery of tests on the chip (Our current results are only after less than 24 hours of testing and only on a single chip).





 

Last Metabank post : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2683984
"About the timing - everything is going according to plan. No artificial delays will not.
Remained the only risky step, the production of boards at the Russian factory. By this process, we carefully prepare in advance."

nice thank you nigel!
, any other news from metabank? Do we know how many chips metabank will use now? Or any other news from metabank?

regards

Hi All,

We received our prototype PCBs today, and have made very good progress with testing of the BitFury ASIC samples:

https://bitcentury.io/blog/initial-testing-of-bitfury-asic

Upcoming tests will include use of an external clock, and chaining of boards.

Regards,
Nigel / OrphanedGland

Hi All,

I just received some BitFury ASIC chips today.  Big thanks to BitFury for giving myself and the BitCentury team this opportunity.  We are currently waiting for our initial prototype PCBs to be manufactured.  I will keep you up to date with progress of the testing, but in the meantime check the following link for the pics: http://bitcentury.io/blog/bitfury-asics-have-arrived.

Regards,

Nigel / OrphanedGland

I for one would not be surprised to see Bitfury ship as early as August based on the speed of the development process so far.

Right now it's been shown to operate at up to 4Gh/s. We'll know more once we begin testing the chips ourselves.



I believe they are indeed just being conservative. As it's been shown with other asic suppliers assembly is a tedious process with many bits you need to be sure are in stock. If any of the bits are not in stock you're looking at a 2 week delay.

Thank you for providing that update. Does anyone know why metabank are targeting the end of the range previously quoted (August-October)? I had the impression that the end of the range was for the circumstance that the chips would need a respin/redesign before mass production. The early testing suggests that bitfury beat his power/performance expectations, so that won't be necessary. I also note 100TH are getting their chips made up into boards over the next few weeks and are targetting the 3rd week of July for production.

Are metabank just being conservative? Is it because more work is required to get peak performance (~5GH/s) out of the chip for the finished machines?

How fast is the BitFury chip?

BITFURY chip hashing against 4 block erupter usbs!

Wow, seems like this project is progressing very very nicely !

Any foreseeable trouble with shipping these units to the USA ? Interested in placing an order for one.

Nice   Pics of the sexy, bare PCB would be eroticfun to look at!