Topic: BlockBurner LLC - Crucible FPGA Scrypt Miner - Announcement Aug-19 - page 11. (Read 42381 times)

I'm getting 380 - 400Kh/s with each of my 5850s. Using 12.8 drivers, 12.8 APP SDK. The only thing I can think of is that you may be using a low intensity associated with SHA256 such as 11. With litecoin mining, you should be using an intensity of 18, and move up to 19 and 20 if your card doesn't crash at these.

Actually you should be getting roughly 10% more Kh/s than Mh/s with scrypt.

You could certainly start with a pure software approach and then gradually optimize it with custom instructions.  You wouldn't ever get the speed of a pure RTL design, but it's a good (rewarding) exercise.  With the reduced resource, utilization you could end up with the fastest implementation on the BeMicro.

The team is just now being cemented while I get our home base in order, so no ETA yet but hopefully soon. This is pretty much day 1   And I agree, which is why BlockBurner will be a community driven company. Much like Local Motors (the community engineered Ralley Fighter car), the idea is to crowd source a design for a production device and utilizing open source solutions whenever possible. My position in it is overall project management and business logistics, organizing funding campaigns, design, and handling final production and distribution in house. Everything will be made transparent as to company operations and finances.

Bitcoin is a community built protocol, I think businesses around it should be built the same way. If this is the future of currency, then we must create the future of business to support it. The community spirit is the most pervasive element of the protocol. The response I am seeing here is evidence of that.

This is why I have no wish to simply fish for people willing to submit their money to a pre-order and hope for the best like other companies. A properly crowd-funded campaign is the better way to go for a bootstrap industry, so that is the approach I am going to take. BlockBurner has nothing to hide. Funds will only be delivered when a known point is reached that should suffice to fund that stage of development. This keeps expectations in check, and clarity to the process. Unlike BFL there will be constant updates and publicly accessible accounting so you know where your money is going. There will be a way to opt out as well if you change your mind, though refunds can only be done so long as those funds are not invested toward the goal. Until goals are reached, BlockBurner will take possession of nothing, safe in escrow until then and not before. The dev team will be compensated for their good work at project completion, in a way that is decided as fair, likely a reserved front row stake in a Batch 1 device.

Nothing is wrong with crowd funded efforts, but these companies are doing it wrong. I want to fly right by the community with transparency so I never see "is BlockBurner a scam?" pop up here someday. There is no trust being developed by these companies by being dodgy, not a good way for a business to start out with a cloud of doubt over it.

The response here is awesome guys, I have been working on getting things set up on my end non stop, I will do my best not to disappoint you.

All devs interested in this project are welcome to PM me, I am getting things organized and we will break things up into separate focus groups soon and start talking about the logistics.

To the devs I have talked to so far, thank you again for your interest, you will be hearing from me soon as I get the BlockBurner site forums up over the next day or so. I am going to also try an integrate a project management system.

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Operatr

Interesting stuff. Thinking about having a play around with this myself. Is there any opensource Scrypt VHDL out there? Or should I just roll my own with the SHA1 and mod the Salsa20 that is up on opencores site? I'm not thinking about mining or anything just to get some throughput data/energy costs etc and also work out what the problems are people will face who want todo it properly.

If all else fails I'm thinking of running it on top of a NIOS II implementation. Completely pointless but got to be worth a shot just for the laughs.

I hope we will be seeing some updates soon.

Interested

Can you share a link to the threads with your bandied about numbers?  I haven't seen anybody say anything that outrageous here.

NO.... I cannot see FPGA beating 8750 or 8790

But the real issue is no one is sharing any Litecoin FPGA figures, considering all these 'prototypes' floating about ......
It is the  'Tom'/ BFL fuckfest all over again..........

Personally I have great difficulty believing some of the figures that are being bandied about for litecoin FPGA. I've see statements such as

"Spartan6 XC6SLX150 fits only 8 scratchpads. If BRAMs are not used for bitcoin computations, it is possible to implement LTC mining for XC6SLX150 at about 50 - 100 kh/s per chip with about 80% of slices free."

Quite frankly  I find this very difficult to believe.. Because I'm seeing figures of about 3k flipflops & 5k =LUTS for a SCRYPT engine.

Xc6SLX150 is specd at  23,000 slices  each slice contains 4 LUTS & 8 FF
so ~23,000*4 =~98k LUTS

So just taking into account the LUTS:
 8 cores = 8*5k =~40k LUTS, which in no way leaves "about 80% of slices free", and NO way am I seeing anything near 100Kh/s.

To have ~80% free you would need to implement 8 engines in ~20k LUTS ,~2.5K LUTS per engine.
Sorry but  for a SCRYPT engine I have to call bullshit...

Then suddenly I see this sort of thing in the same discussion.
"multiple smaller DRAM chips working in parallel will do best job... Allowing about 500 mega-transfers for low-cost / mid-cost fpga, that is 500 giga-bits per second or 60 gigabytes per second. Overall cost of DRAM will be about 150 EUR- and of FPGA to handle that about 300 EUR-. If works in fully-pipelined manner it would give about 500 kh/s mining performance for litecoin application."

So  ABRACADABRA... we have a  5 fold increase in performance,  and not a SINGLE analysis on actual cycle times any place to be seen.

Looking forward to hear more on this project.

Any idea on prototype ETA? - some already have talked about various prototypes in the works?

The key is the transparency imho - is there a REAL product, and are they consistent in quality? Does it verifiably beat forthcoming 8750 and 8790 in measurements of performance and power usage?

K some VERY VERY preliminary verifiable measurements. (verifiable from my side).

Iv'e had code for some time that takes about 1ms to do ONE round (no laughing at the back there), which would make it about a 1kh/s.
This is actual code on an FPGA,  yes it has not been optimized yet and yes it is a SINGLE core.

I had not done any work on it, purely because I was working on a 'crypto job' for someone else.... then there was the work on getting  the Bitcoin FPGA code operating at a higher level, currently thats clocking about 350MH/s on a xilinx, with bitcoins at a stupid level, and the fact that BFL & TOM both shafted me on deliveries of ASIC kit it is about priorities.(beer money)

Since I recently took a slagging down on IRC about what some called  'stock images' that I : "had modified so they could not be google searched" , there were requests for a special 'proof' message which I have included specifically for the IRC doubters.



This is not a  'get rich quick scheme' but rather a pure research task, possibly the first images of  an FPGA product running litecoin.
Crypto currencies are of interest to me, but I really will be surprised if people can break into high double figures with a single core on an FPGA.

I have a couple of 5870's that give me 400 to 407 MHash doing SHA256 mining, but mucking around with all the suggested settings for litecoin the best I have been able to get them to do for scrypt mining is about 250 to 260 Khash. So to me GPUs are not looking real good for litecoin mining, certainly not the one Khash scrypt per 1 Mhash SHA256 one sees often as a rule of thumb estimate.

Maybe though there is more to getting the 5870 to work right than the thread about litecoin mining has mentioned?

Basically I am figuring I might as well use my GPUs for SHA256-based merged mining, mostly for the altcoins, and look toward FPGA for scrypt coins.

-MarkM-

Not that I remember. But then again I get close to 100 pms every couple days and 100s of emails and IMs daily. What did you need help with? Or did you ask for something in our IP that I was not willing to disclose.

Sorry , you seem to have a very short memory....... or are you saying that it was not you that had the PM from me......

obviously I would be highly interested but I'm also high interested in what the performance increase is really going to be.   I think the excitement over these devices is based on the fact people know the next step in Bitcoin mining was FPGA's and they are expecting a similar improvement in hashing when thinking of a scrypt mining FPGA.  I just do not see the gains being worth it, but perhaps I will be wrong.  Considering something like a 7970 gets 650-700 kh/s at 200 watts a card (excluding cpu/mb wattage for arguements sake) and one can safely assume the 8970's will be in the 750-800 kh/s maybe even 850 kh/s at around the same watts or possibly less - I just do not see there being good enough gains to justify it. 

Trust me though - I PRAY that I am wrong.  But I'm also thinking these things aren't going to be cheap.  So while you may save on electricity because say it only eats 75-100 watts (its just going to consume more power then a bitcoin fpga because of the memory, lets face it) If your getting saying 800-900 kh/s for I''m guessing around $1000-1500 somewhere in there?   To get to my current hashrate I'd be looking at around a 7 unit array at 7000-10,000 investment. 

That' s a whole lot of electricity before I finally break even.  At roughly a 1300 watt savings a month, your looking at what... $1500 a year in savings for electricty.  The initial investment in my rigs was a little over 3k so your looking at a minimum of 2 years before you start to see any kind of return.  And that is figuring things at my high 13.8 cents a kw/h cost!  There are a lot of people that pay a lot less which means your looking at an even longer time frame before you are able to see any kind of return. 

And at the end of it what do you have?  Something you MAY be able to sell for use as a miner or sold to someone to re-purpose or play with for an extreme discount.  Where as the GPU's you would at least be able to offload to possibly miners - but there will ALWAYS be a gaming market.

Maybe I'm not looking at this 100% correctly and I'm completely open to hearing other peoples opinions on the matter.  I just can not see the benefit for scrypt mining.  Maybe in an asic device?  Because then you might be able to crank out redonkulous hashing power at very little wattage.  Then, we are talking about something that makes a bit of sense.  Sure, the asic device can't be used for anything else but mining.  But at least the hashing power to wattage used will be advantageous enough to warrant the risk.

DIff is why you want high efficiency; all the fast-buck people with their marginal efficiency units will drive diff up fast, until their electricity costs put them out of business. Then the electrically efficient ones will keep on chugging along.

-MarkM-

To me this is somewhat of an odd statement. As long as you can mine at a profitable rate of hash/watt I would assume (for me at least) that speed would be the absolute priority. Sure, you can prob build something that is extremely low watt, but what you really want to do is beat difficulty increase by mining FAST @ consistent and profitable hash/watt ratio. Diff is the killer!

The main thing with buying an FPGA (or ASIC for that matter) for me would be electricity use. It would have to run at better than 5khash/watt at the very least to get my interest.

Is there any specs for the hash costs for a bitcoin FPGA/ASIC? The memory accesses would presumablyincrease the power consumption for a litecoin system.



Could you not voltage divide the 12v from the ATX and then use a 3v3 regulator? You'd want to divide first because you don't want to drop too much across a regulator or you'll be throwing away a lot of money as heat!

I have not received any requests for help with this project so it is independent of our project.

So is this a second team now working on scrypt FPGAs?

Are they starting from scratch or continuing along with work already started by the previous team?

-MarkM-

Sorry for the off topic.  It seemed relevant at the time.  Good luck.