Do they ever mention what the hashrate will be? Or, just the power consumption per Th/s as 230 watts?
I may be stretching, but a 2.4+ Th/s machine for <$700 SHIPPED would be amazing.
The 230watt / th is THE hard figure they've mentioned, though the fine print on that specified chips running at .66 volts.
Presuming they stick with string design, that DOES specify 18 chips per string.
It would be VERY VERY iffy for them to try to cram 54 hash chips on one hash board.
Therefore, the general consensus has been 2 hash boards, 2 strings per chip, appx. 2.3 TH at appx 550 watts ballpark for an S7, at around 4 BTC PLUS shipping (or around $930ish at current BTC pricing). Call it $1000 or so shipped.
That appears to be a fair assessment. With those number, with no difficulty increase, ROI is ~300 days. That is going to be tight with the halving in less than a year and possible difficulty increases. Bitcoin price again is a huge unknown.
Doing the math, what was your energy cost? Considering the halving and diffuculty increase 300 days are too much.
I think I was figuring 10 cents / watt, but I don't think I factored in diff increases. Someone mentioned somewhere that Bitmain prices their miners to ROI in 250 days without diff increases, so I plugged the numbers I had estimated for TH and watts into that.
There is absolutely no consensus that it will cost $930, none at all.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/closed-dogies-bitmain-antminer-s7-guess-the-price-prize-1159185 Most of the entries seem to be clustering pretty close to 4 Bitcoin - which was worth about $930ish when I posted that price estimate.
(Edit) Just went back and counted, an outright majority of entries are guessing prices between 3 and 5 BTC, the rest are all over the map and some of the rest are insane (like the ones at 1.something or 11+).
I'd be HAPPY to see it at 3ish Bitcoin or less, but I don't believe that is even CLOSE to a reasonable expectation after factoring in the additional efficiency vs. the S5 - do note that the last S5 price was right about half of that estimate, do you REALLY think Bitmain isn't going to charge a premium for the DOUBLED efficiency vs. 2 S5s that hash at pretty much the same rate combined?
But it is hard to tell if they come out and no one else has something to compete.
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The only current competition for us non-HUGE mining corps is that Sfards SF100 massively overpriced joke, for now. That will change, but looks like won't be 'till December or whenever Innosilicon released the A3 and miners using it start hitting sales (Lktec has already announced. Innosilicon themselves I'm rather certain will do an update on their Terminator as well, in both SHA256 (A3) and Scrypt (A4) versions.).
Even at 2% diff increase for the forseeable future (which seems to be about what's happening the last few weeks, about when Bitmain started selling "used" S5 units presumably due to internal production allowing them to replace them with S7s) the S7 should be solidly profitable after the halfing and for quite a while after that. The *S5* will get very very marginal as of the halfing, depending on your electric price.
