Topic: Bitfury: "16nm... sales to public start shortly" - page 42. (Read 108494 times)

same here.

I still would like to know how much would be required to get a 16nm design to engineering samples.

I willing to invest up to about $40K for starters if I knew we could have a damn good product with excellent efficiency that would be in the mix for quite a while.  When I say efficient, I'm talking about 0.06 watts per GH/s or better.  If we had a rig with 16nm chips and that kind of efficiency, I'm game.  We just need a lot more investors it sounds like.  I don't even want to start a thread on this to begin anything like this and put all the effort into sending hundreds of PM's out to people to market it to them if it's not possible for that kind of efficiency and/or coordination.

It's also important to have this done in a way that protects everyone's investment.  I mentioned earlier that if the money needed to get it moving was not accomplished within a certain time frame, there needs to be a means of everyone being able to get their money back.

It would take more than just me getting the word out.  I know I sent out hundreds of emails to get people to point their rigs to CK/Kano Pool a couple of months ago.  I got quite a bit of people to come over.  They too talked to people to get them to come over.  People have to be willing to invest the time to send out PM's to get it going.  However, FIRST, I need to know it CAN be done and A PLAN has to be put together to explain [To would be investors] HOW things would be accomplished, WHO will accomplish WHAT and WHEN.  It will take some coordination, for sure.

EDIT:  People have to be chosen who will maintain contact with people and institutions throughout every phase of the design, development and manufacturing.  Many things to consider and coordinate.

Yeah, this is a good point to emphasize. There were several counterfeit FTDI chips. All of them used much larger and more complex SoC chips with single fixed program to emulate the real FTDI. The large SoCs were cheaper because they were manufactured in much larger quantities and had multiple competing sources.

The main value of the real FTDI's is in their much higher immunity to noise and clever design that allows for much lower bit error rates. But many designs completely waste that additional functionality. One example probably known here would be ngzhang's ICARUS board (dual Spartan 6) where he simply wouldn't bother to route any signals beyond the minimum of RxD and TxD to the FPGA. This is the reason why all the Icarus-compatible miners have so much reliability problems with the communication between the chips and software.

Trying to understand why the counterfeit using 10-100 times more gates than the real chip is cheaper than the original is a good introduction to the financial aspect of semiconductor manufacturing. Much better than throwing nearly random megabucks imaginary costs.

Agreed.
In my dealings long ago with the now infamous Joshua Zipkin of the AMT/Bitmine.ch mess, he mentioned that at the time there were only 2 people that led the designs of chips from ASICMINER, BFL and HashFast. He dinna name names but did say they collaborated and mainly used the different chips to test out their ideas on How To Do It and sold said companies on producing them. We know how well that went... BTC miner maker Cabal conspiracy theory? Don't know if it was true but ya gotta admit, all 3 companies by and large had the same issues in trying to get miners for the general public out the door . Considering chip performance they seemed more concerned on as fast as possible getting a chip that worked at all vs one properly tweaked to work well and to the pre-order specs.

re:IP protection, FTDI and their USB-RS232 converter chips comes to mind.One tweak they did to combat the flood of generic microcontroller (and cheaper) based converters was add an ID code and got MS to look for it when you run Win7 and higher. If not properly signed Winbloze refuse to use it. Grant you many of the counterfeit usb-rs232 adapters were crap and FTDI's *do* work better but still. 

And the above is exactly a pitch from con man or somebody so naïve that is indistinguishable from a con man.

Bitcoin mining is full of chips designed by barely competent CAD monkeys. The access to capital is not sufficient to produce a worthwhile chip. It is the access to the required knowledge that is the differentiator.

Another symptom typical of a con man (or an equivalent naïf) is a reference to "drop and place IP blocks". No mining chip used such blocks for hashing engines. They may have contained IP blocks for e.g. clock generation PLL. But all the mining chips starting from the first ones by ASICMINER and BFL were custom RTL synthesized using standard-cell design flow. The differences in performance were mostly in the amount of tuning work done before the tapeout. That's why there's no valuable IP (intellectual property) in the masks for the obsolete chips (like Hashfast tried to sell). The intellectual property mostly consists of babysitting the toolchain through the iterations of the optimization process.

I've been there and done it. Many ASICs are designed and manufactured just for the purpose of copy protection and design security: to make coming to market with competitive product too expensive by eschewing anything off-the-shelf or available from a second source. From what I understand such nearly-empty chips are nowadays even more popular to hide the patent infringement amongst the completely bogus chip-space-filling circuits.

^^ Exactly!

what about an entire airport

http://www.newscenter.philips.com/main/standard/news/press/2015/20150416-philips-provides-light-as-a-service-to-schiphol-airport.wpd

@dmwardjr


I don't know why you can't do that only problem i see it finding some one that will sell us some space and we need some one that is willing to design a chip etc .in a few month's i should have a few bitcoins saved up won't be much but some thing  and would be willing to invest them in some thing worth while, instead of buying a outdated miner the way it's benign to look.

 I'm sure a few others would, just to keep miners in the home etc .

I agree on that point. The hard part would be to get the chip customer interested in bundling a mining circuit into said other use chips. I'd LOVE to see folks making chips for IoT jump on this. Last I heard the market will be several billion IoT chips this year. Shades of the BitFury light bulb or Bitmains AntRouter...

Cree and Phillips are already working on their LED bulbs acting as a light-based wireless link along with a WiFi circuit in them for lighting control. One step further is their using POE to not only communicate with the luminaries but also to power them. Gets around needing electricians to install the wiring and code restrictions on how/where the wiring is ran. To me that screams to put a miner in there! Of course, as a single bulb/miner it would hardly be worth the time to even setup a wallet for the 'income' but if you are talking about an entire building full of lights... Hmm.

This might explain it more .!!! I've had that bookmarked for sometime now, i found Browning one day , it's out dated true but tells a lot .

http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made


A non-trivial design will probably cost $3000 or more for 40 chips. The finer the feature size, the more expensive it is to make the masks.

So it takes mega bucks to get a batch in production. How many bucks to get a design as far as engineering samples?

So all a sha256 miners chip is doing in this case unless you have big bucks is riding on the shirt tails of a much bigger thing . like Intel or AMD ? .

bitfury, didn't make the 16 nm design, i know, that's was more like Intel or Samsung etc . TSMC etc   .

What is bitfury actually paying if that is true and how bad are they sticking it to us if they do sell to the public ? .

later i need to let it go .

Well that sentence is the only thing that matters. Sure anyone can design an SHA core for "free" (which many people including hobbyists have done on this forum and elsewhere). I don't think anyone is saying it takes millions of R&D to layout a SHA core.

Getting that free core on usable silicon is all about those megabucks. No matter who you know or whether you a top level silicon engineer at Intel or AMD, you still need the couple million for that mask, minimum wafer order and packaging etc. to have a usable and sellable chip (and of course that dosent even cover the fact that SHA cores in the least chips are no longer just drop and place IP Blocks like they were when the first ASICS came out).

Here is an even better perspective...the combined trading volume for BTC was around 50mil over the last 24 hours. Even if Bitmain decided to dump all 8 mil of their holdings at once on a single exchange (which would be very dumb and they would never do that), the price would crash to around $320-350 depending on the exchange, and would quickly recover.

Even the largest mining companies have less and less say on the economics of bitcoin, and the will be even more true come summer. Thats by design and how its supposed to work. Right now and into the future its going to be all about breaking bitcoin into mass adoption, and that will dictated its acceptance or failure in the long term...not mining. All the miners will eventually just eat themselves to death haha.

I don't think we've communicated. I wasn't talking about a separate, discrete chip. I was talking about using a little free space (and maybe pins) on some larger chip with completely different purpose and market.

The incremental cost of adding tiny mining test circuit would be nearly zero. For an engineer with experience in the actual toolchain used in his main project, the additional effort required to drop SHA256D miner is about one to few wasted lunch breaks. All the required expensive work will be done anyway while doing the main project. If the main project already has some scheduled design iterations the miner can ride all of them for free.

This is the way one can tell that people quoting megabucks figures have no actual technical contacts in the industry. They may have some sales or non-technical middle management contacts. The SHA256D miner is so simple that nearly all the R&D on the engine can be done for free by somebody who already has access to the appropriate tools and kits.

The megabucks are only necessary when one wants to mass-produce chips by filling entire wafers with them. The quantification of possible market is also completely different story from the R&D costs.

I don't argue where the coins are held but If bitmaintech flooded the market with s-7's in a private farm as a preemptive strike against 14-16  gear.   a drop in price to  150 would cost them over 5 million in fiat.

the account is 370 x 23000 = 8.5 million usd if coins drop to 150 it is 3.45 million

I would like to see them lose that kind of coin if indeed they are plying this hash spike game.

I am a small potatoes guy 12,000 usd in ⅓ coins, cash, gear.

I like the idea of private  world wide money.

 I know speculators hold a lot of coins.  More then me by far.
They hold more silver then me.
They hold more gold then me.

also in each case they have far more gold silver then I do.
 I will never affect price I am far too small.

Overall, a spot-on assessment.
On 'spare' or wasted Si real estate, ja it's there and available for sample runs. If you have a design already laid out that is. Then the only problem becomes getting the foundries to be interested in running them. That simply will not happen unless you convince them that the sample runs will eventually translate into full wafer production.

A good example is from one the customers we did R&D for regarding RFID tags for lab animals. The tag itself is a very common chip with nothing new except for size (needs to fit on the ear of 1week-old lab mice) and packaging material (encased in ceramic to resist chewing). Even with the chips using 22nm junctions they had a devil of a time getting a foundry and packaging house to make samples until they pointed out to them that the the market for the tags is well over 100million/year. THAT got their attention and said tags are now in production.

23,000 BTC is only a small drop in the bucket.  We have approximately 15 million bitcoins in existence now.  Most of the bitcoin held today is not by miners but by speculators.

this would be okay if home miners have enough coin to drop price to under 200 usd.

A price crash to 150-200usd would cut big farmers badly especially if they are using  s-7's and avalon6's.

right now bitmaintech is holding more then 23,000 coins in 1 or 2 wallets.

a price tank to 150 would cost them 220 x 23,000