Topic: Bitfury: "16nm... sales to public start shortly" - page 15. (Read 108494 times)

One benefit of BM1385 over A3218 is there's a published datasheet with protocol documentation. However, 0.5mm is about as precise as I can feasibly manufacture without investing probably another $10-15K in equipment. I already have enough trouble with the BM1384 Compacs. I have figured out most of the issues to streamlining, and a chip with pins down two sides instead of all 4 will be easier to wrangle. If I could get BM1385 ASICs would not be ideal, but certainly better than nothing. As it is I'd rather work with Bitfury, or the A3218.

However, probably the best practical efficiency for BM1385 or A3218 is about 0.18J/GH. With the stock setpoint of a Bitfury board being about 60% that power consumption, and the bottom-clock setting about 35% that power consumption, the initial cost of the miner would have to be crazy low to offset the increased operating cost and the long-term viability by comparison is shot to crap.

thanks! but we don't know the price per chip if BitFury starts to sell after the halving event. the price should be lower than $13.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.14633894
Talk to him about it. He seems to be interested in talking to BitFury or has tried to.

serious question:

where does the price of $13 per chip comes from?

Crypto hit a couple good points on the $13 pricing with the biggest being BF's internal use accounting: Remember, BitFury as a Corp has several divisions, one being building fixed or 'mobile' Peta-farms to whom the chip div will be selling their product. The chip div makes their markup and the farm building div makes theirs as well. Yeah it's sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul but that's how the money shuffle goes to add up to a very nice bottom-line for the parent company.

Again though, if BitFury really intends to support a Community miner project then screw $13. They know it will not be competing with commercial miner sales so at least give us their best high-volume price or even at-cost. Pretty sure they can do a money shuffle to justify it and still come out ahead.

The other point is that these are 1st production run chips so yeah they will sell at a premium as will the 1st commercial miners using them. As to what price for later runs will be, not sure. the new 16/14nm node pricing cannot be compared to the models for the now very mature higher node sizes. With it just now coming online for boutique chips like miner ASIC's I think TSMC and the very few other foundries capable of producing  16/14nm dies are going to be charging all they can get for quite a while. They have several Tier-1 customers to satisfy using all the production capacity they can throw into that. Everyone else pays a premium to get shoehorned into that.

On the s7 chips.... Sorry about the chip package size Spoiler alert: 100um pitch is now out in the wild as well and our customer in Taiwan is asking us to do our bit to take it under 50um

But as to using bare s7 chips... Once Bitmain releases their 16nm miner, think they would be more open to selling the s7 chips? Just how low of J/GHs can they be taken?

Fabb'ing a chip to tape out (in qty's of 250,000 minimum) is about 2 million. Don't see that happening anytime soon.

Number 1 is out, mostly for the reason that in order to not feel like I was screwing people over I'd have to sell miners pretty much at cost, and that doesn't keep me in business.
Number 2 is out because I've tried to raid an S7 and it sucks. Those heatsinks are hard to get off without wrecking the chip, and the chip itself is 0.4mm pin pitch which sucks to work with.
Numbers 3 and 4 are less distasteful but also less likely. Number 3 wouldn't be too bad as long as the people running the place had clear job descriptions and the authority to do their jobs thoroughly - managers do the paperwork and don't screw up the engineers, and engineers have the final say on design. Both sides are essential, but another thing that's essential is not sitting around for a friggin' year with thumbs up butts talking about things that don't matter instead of designing and prototyping a quality product and getting it to market. I like to think about Lockheed back during WW2, when they were asked to design and build a jet fighter (completely from scratch) and deliver a working model within nine months - a task many considered impossible - and they rolled it out ahead of schedule. That's the kind of stuff that can happen when people are allowed to do their jobs without interference.
Another problem is it takes an awful lot of money.

$13/chip is ~$10/chip over the cost to develop, manufacture, fabricate.
It's typical to ~double the cost to produce a product in setting a MSRP.
By my math, they ought to be around ~$6-$7 each, in any quantity.

These estimates are valid for the first production run.
Follow on production runs have no or significantly reduced embedded RD&D costs, so the price should drop, slightly.
To say $5-$6 /  chip.

Likely there are several reasons supporting the $13/chip MSRP:
1) They are the "only game in town",
2) There are significant benefits from an accounting standpoint for chips used internally priced at $13/chip,
3) Provides justification to "discount" chips supplied to other larger-ish board producers if sales to the community project are charged $13/chip,
4) and lastly, companies are in the business to make money. Maximizing that benefits shareholders. Upper level management reports to and maintains employment from the board of directors. If it came to light that profits were not maximized on a given product line that "official" would be eligible for termination.

As I see it, the community project has 4 choices:
1) "Bite the bullet" and pay the $13/chip,
2) Buy a bunch of S7's, rape the chips off the boards, and let sidehack work his magic on/with efficient board design,
3) A group of community members could band together and create AM version 2, fab a chip (BE400 ) and then produce boards/machines based off that chip,
4) lastly and least likely, a crowd funded community effort to produce a community chip sold at or near cost.

Personally, I like none of the above, for a variety of reasons.

I was planning to visit Amsterdam for it.

I'd be okay with about $8. I would really like to be able to build a 20-chip board to fit the S1 chassis, with voltage adjustment, and sell it for about $600 per pair. That would pretty much require chips under ten dollars; the lower the better because that $600 can come down.

Regarding chips and who to talk to - I know nothing more than anyone else around here. The only Bitfury contact I've had was with Punin, and I haven't heard anything out of him since about the end of January.

$13 is way too much. And do not forget there's halving just around the corner.

I thought $13 sounded not too bad.  but I'll let the experts debate this one out.

and 1m in chips.. dam that's a whole load of burned fingers and solder haha!

I know but I have a mail from them quoting the same. Between @Sidehack do you know where can I go meet these bitfury guys for their chips?

$13 per chip is about twice what it should be.

Sounds like a croudfunding project -> SIDEHACK -> can someone please get sidehack in here!!!

$13/Chip

MOQ - $1M

You'll get Roughly around 76924 chips.

So dose anyone have any idea on the cost of the 16nm?

Seems to be the last piece of the puzzle.

Here is the demo videos of the 16nm chip in action

PS Bitfury probably  not a good idea releasing a video showing your system running as ROOT.. its a big no no..

Anyway..

16nm Demo Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbmuBvDWo0

Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZPum2zqGPE

Part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbmuBvDWo0

I don't mean a visit, I'll be business to them.

Do they even receive visitors?

I'm aware of that, bro. Can you just help me out with my query?