Topic: BitFury 110GH/s per rack? (Read 11013 times)

Ima puttin my mod hat on here.

Don't feed the trolls, even if the troll is your competitor and you're both making lots of money. Just don't do it.

I really dislike being drawn into these discussions but in this case it's necessary to correct you.  BF Labs has never gone on record claiming it's previous generation processors are pure ASIC.  Never.  Forum members simply came to their own conclusions based on our FAQ (which did not say it was pure ASIC, just left it ambiguous).  Others read erroneous forum posts as fact and then repeated them as the lore of the day.   Now you're doing the same in hopes of undermining our reputation as you release your product.  There's no mystery here as to what's going on and I'm not so naive to think this post will stop it.  Carry on.

Hrm, not too sure about that.  FPGAs are pretty easy to simulate in software… it just takes a really really really long time and runs really really really slowly.  But the attacker only has to do that once.  The root problem is that they don't need to be able to understand your design; they only need to be able to simulate the device it runs on and snoop the bits being written into the ICAP port.



I believe so.  I can't speak for Xilinx in particular, but I know a guy who had to design a decryption circuit with this property for some sort of wireless system.  There are lots of ways to do it; some of them aren't too hard.  The lazy way is to run your circuit through a transformation that turns every wire into two wires; on odd numbered clock cycles you drive both wires to zero and on even numbered clock cycles you pull high exactly one of the wires (the "left" one to represent logic-1 and the "right" one to represent logic-0).  So the power consumption is perfectly uniform: for each bit there is one wire worth of capacitance discharged on each odd-numbered cycle and one wire worth of capacitance charged on each even-numbered cycle.  Of course this makes your circuit 2-3 times larger and twice as slow, but for something tiny like an AES core it's no big deal.



Probably a good idea.  Here's one other reason I forgot: if you let people ship you boards that you didn't design, how do you know they don't have a microcontroller on there somewhere snooping the JTAG bus and capturing your decryption key as you send it to the device in cleartext?  If the snoop wire is on one of the inner planes of a 4-layer board and the microcontroller draws power from VCCAUX you'd never notice it.



I think there's a real market for that -- combined hardware and hosting sales.  You can also offer to ship them the hardware but tell them you're going to wipe the bitstream and encryption key off of it before you ship it out.



Definitely.

You're on the right track there!  But buy-back guarantees aren't the only preannouncement/vaporware-proof sales strategy.  There's another one, and it's called….



I believe it's about to look slightly less brilliant.

Keep in mind that BFL has already lied once about whether or not their product was a custom ASIC, and they got caught.  Then they simply deleted the ASIC claim from their FAQ.

I must have missed this one.

Do want!

I've already disclosed it, but I would not exactly tell that say Spartan has price $xxx because it is not the case with chip markets, as what basically cost there is not chip production, but NRE (R&D, masks, marketing etc) costs that Xilinx paid to make Spartan's rolling. And price for it will be falling with time.

But most important for Xilinx is not to make competition for their sales of Sparan's for other purpose - i.e. that will not buy it for $50 and sell for $100 to other contractors of them, who buy them at $100 level.

This is as ASIC vs FPGA design... FPGA is basically custom ASIC... do you think that its price is what silicon worth ? It's basically interest that FPGA vendor would like to get. I've told it already - that if FPGA vendor would like to - he can blow off with 28-nm say Virtex-7 sales for $50 that could be priced $10k on digikey any ASIC initiative here... And FPGA vendors more likely impose danger, as FPGAs are better suited for such calculations than say what GPU vendors manufacture...

This is what actually rises concerns about proof-of-work overall security. If you mention Scrypt - then - I can place about 4 to 6 hashers inside of Spartan and get blowing off speeds for that..... So it is even worse... As this makes edge for FPGA actually better than worse. As RAM accesses could be pipelined via multiple pipes............ getting bandwidthes that would not be available within usual computers/GPUs. Although I cannot parallelize single Scrypt, I can execute MULTIPLE calculations of different Scrypts - that's the point... Pipelining accesses to RAM...

What can really make benefits - is the both - modification of hashing algorithm and calculated hash, making ASICs obsolete, and highly-tuned FPGA modules, GPU modules and CPU modules more or less comparable. But that requires complex research indeed and probably not question of current day, and it should be performed by people not only who knows math in cryptography, but who also knows how hardware could be implemented etc. This not going to happen soon indeed as well.

And another weakness is ability to merge mining into pools... As this allows to manipulate hashing power against network...

That's what I mean, $700/6 = $117. That doesn't leave a lot of room for the board, other components and assembly. I was wondering how many FPGAs he's going through.

No, in volume of 100s, a Spartan6-150 costs just barely more than $100. $110, $115, $120, something like that.

Feel free to not disclose this, but what kind of volume are you going through that you're able to get a finished board with 6 LX150s on it for $700? I would have thought that even in large volume the S-6 LX150s would cost close to that.

CONFIRM. Exactly how this is done... Why to install multiple K RAM, if you can install only few one per whole chip ? ;-)


I've thought that it is different to convert .bit to .ncd .... But as you given me following links it seems to be trivial...


-1 for Xilinx... it means that their bitstream non-disclosure protection basically make burden on normal developers, but not defies hackers / ip thieves, because they would have time and money to invest into reverse-engineering tools.


Just downloaded it... But if .bit -> .ncd could be converted - it will be not difficult to decode keys from chip. OR - EXTREMELY complex self-modifying bitstream should be made for protection alone... So costs would be not justified for this SHA256 thing protection alone... I've implemented some time ago meta-translators for x86 code protection, generating morphed code & executable difficult for analysis, and with FPGA it would be even more complex.


So in -7 series they will make logic that consumes _same_ power not depending on their internal key, so correlation will not be possible ? Have they at least aware of such bug ?

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I'll wait for your release, anyway you have my question in your thread.... And I may reconsider initial licensing offer, as I still have no binding on that of course. As I still have about 200 Gh/s power, and if it would become 240 Gh/s - that would be nice benefit. And it is substantial benefit, as I can get board for say

$700 without VAT with 6 spartan6 on it - if it would be 1.8 Gh/s this means $0.38 per Mh/s
if it would be 2.2 Gh/s this means $0.32 per Mh/s.

So looking again on these numbers and having troubles with protection of bitstream, all of these devices can be "on hold" in some datacenter say in Iceland in name of their owners, but without ability to get them in hardware or get access without our consent/permission to equipment until IP released open-source. And open-source release I believe should be done at least for educational purposes, when we'll be ready to roll out best 28nm technology. Say this could be beneficial for DMC initiative. Also _existing_ hashing power (200 GH/s) can be good backing that equipment would be actually deployed, as my investors trust me with this.

So the coupon for 1 Mh/s with say 1 year hardware redemption possibility if you get enough for single board + shipment can be sold for about $0.60 + cost of equipment maintenance, insurance, etc - that would be fair price. And seems to be more fair play than "perpetual bonds" without significant backing, where bond issuer can go defunct half the road etc.
And also looking @ GLBSE it seems to be very risky, I suppose that some legal framework needed for this, to protect rights of buyers. Just putting reputation against such venture would be not enough I think. As investing into mining not with 4-6 month break even point would scare off investors if they would feel that fighting for their rights could cost more and without returning their assets than invested funds.

One of the ways could be - implementing specialized legal-based framework for hashing power trading. For example domain names are sold - sold legally and without any problems... And people not worry owning domain name worth say $10'000'000 etc. The same should be with equipment probably for mining, as this could help dramatically to secure investments into IP alone. Into ASIC for example as well. As when it would come to invest say $5 M into ASIC production, and there will be right engineers to proceed - it would be still great problem that "good fellow who organized all of that" would not just take part of these money and run away.

interesting read, thanks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation

the only osbourne i know is norman (aka the green goblin), and a google for "osbourne company, -ozzy, -kelly, -sharon" fails to return anything. care to link?

also, BFL's pay up front policy was always a genius (if somewhat controversial) way to ensure enough bankroll to ramp up production while guarding against competition.

Bring it on

Yeah except DMC could very well be the largest buyer of miner hardware, and if I don't like what BFL now is doing, I won't buy their hardware in the future no matter how cheap it is, and would do business with Bitfury and Eldentyrell instead (who, really, should be combining forces right about now).

I don't think these announcements in close succession are a coincidence.

Seeing that EldenTyrell is planning to sell his 260 MH/s bitstream starting June 1st, Bitfury tried to preempt these sales by disclosing their own 300 MH/s bitstream, which has a better price/performance ratio than BFL's Single, at about half the power draw. Of course, BFL doesn't want Single sales to drop off by 95%, hence they pre-announce their ASIC, and thus ensure that sales of Lancelot, Bitfury and Eldentyrell's bitstream will be zero or close to zero. But such a pre-announcement of a better product can have a devastating side effect on your OWN product sales as well, which has bankrupted more than a few companies. For the baby boomers among us, let me just mention Osborne. Enter the buy-back guarantee. The buy-back guarantee ensures that BFL's sales will be unaffected by the pre-announcement - nobody will cancel existing orders and nobody will shy away from new orders.

Brilliantly played, BFL.

ok, yea... that got some laughs out of me, d3.

So eldentyrell eldentyrell'ed existing Spartan 6 bitstreams, then bitfury eldentyrell'ed eldentyrell, and now BFL is trying to eldentyrell bitfury.

I simply don't have enough popcorn for this.