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Topic: Buying Bitmain or Bitfury ASIC chips directly - page 3. (Read 4529 times)

legendary
Activity: 3374
Merit: 1859
Curmudgeonly hardware guy
That's certainly interesting.
bsp
jr. member
Activity: 40
Merit: 7
Hi all
It seems bitmain sell bm1387 chips
About 7 $ for 10k pieces
As mentioned above if any body wants to buy i am in

Where did you hear that?
Link?
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
Hi all
It seems bitmain sell bm1387 chips
About 7 $ for 10k pieces
As mentioned above if any body wants to buy i am in
legendary
Activity: 3822
Merit: 2703
Evil beware: We have waffles!
I reached out to Bitfury recently.  They quoted 8.15 U.S. a chip and minimum buy of 2 million dollars. not realistic for the hobby engineer.....
An interesting question: Over what time frame would BitFury supply your roughly 245,000 chips if you were to cut them a check for $2M USD? I can understand why you wouldn't have pursued it, but I would think that 245K chips would be a pretty good sized run at a Fab facility, no? I also wonder what level of testing/screening has been done for those parts? I am hardly an ASIC guy, but I have seen the results of poorly screened processors, before the processor vendor has figured out what has to be screened for. Does the recipient of the parts have to speed sort (aka "bin") them?

Maybe NotFuzzy would care to speculate on this (keeping his flame on "low")? Smiley
How many chips per-wafer mainly depends on 2 things: The wafer size and the die size. A decent write up on this is found at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wafer_(electronics) I would hazard that TSMC and Samsung are both using 11 or 12 inch (300mm) wafers. What die sizes that Bitemain, Canaan and, BitFury use so far is a secret... Possibly 2x2 or 4x4mm?

As for spec testing for performance binning, safe bet BitFury will only guarantee a minimum range of speed/Vcore that 'work's' along with quote-unquote Average performance expected from any given lot of chips. Given that even the Avalon chips constantly tweak their speeds when running I doubt any single narrow range of specs can be given. The 14/16nm node seems still just too unpredictable, at least for hot-running miner chips.
alh
legendary
Activity: 1846
Merit: 1052
I reached out to Bitfury recently.  They quoted 8.15 U.S. a chip and minimum buy of 2 million dollars. not realistic for the hobby engineer.....

An interesting question: Over what time frame would BitFury supply your roughly 245,000 chips if you were to cut them a check for $2M USD? I can understand why you wouldn't have pursued it, but I would think that 245K chips would be a pretty good sized run at a Fab facility, no? I also wonder what level of testing/screening has been done for those parts? I am hardly an ASIC guy, but I have seen the results of poorly screened processors, before the processor vendor has figured out what has to be screened for. Does the recipient of the parts have to speed sort (aka "bin") them?

Maybe NotFuzzy would care to speculate on this (keeping his flame on "low")? Smiley
legendary
Activity: 3822
Merit: 2703
Evil beware: We have waffles!
I reached out to Bitfury recently.  They quoted 8.15 U.S. a chip and minimum buy of 2 million dollars. not realistic for the hobby engineer.....
Even *if* does one get hold of chips you then still have to write a driver for them. It is not just a matter of talking to them via I2C or SPI. You need to format the data and establish the work protocols the chips use.

Ever since the s7 Bitmain has stopped providing any of that information. If you do manage to get chips from BitFury only then will they provide the needed resources to write a driver.
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
I reached out to Bitfury recently.  They quoted 8.15 U.S. a chip and minimum buy of 2 million dollars. not realistic for the hobby engineer.....
bsp
jr. member
Activity: 40
Merit: 7
Only Bitfury sells chips along that companies. Minimum order is $500k and $7 per chip.
They were talking about sample orders but since last year there's no update yet. I think it's better to go their HQ and check.

You will have 71.4xx chips in total each can be o/c'ed upto 185 GH/s.

Not a bad idea, this is what I am thinking since a few months but I don't have that much capital yet.

BF says $7/chip and $2M order.
I have connections to make a buy like this. BF salesguy said: "I've forwarded your info to my colleague and he will be in touch shortly".
It has been 3 weeks since then...
Hmmm
Maybe BF is not very keen on selling their 16nm chips?
newbie
Activity: 28
Merit: 0
He probably meant design and have produced a batch of chips, not build a factory from scratch.

Leastways I hope that's what he meant.

All would change is knocking off a couple zeroes from the campaign - still pretty unattainable.

Even though it's a very expensive process to build a batch of chips, since creating masks require cleanrooms for starters...
It's not feasable for a startup company, so why bother
jr. member
Activity: 92
Merit: 1
If this continues, I doubt they will grow (as fast as competitor) except keep luring deep pocket customer to acquire their customized mining chips/system.

For 2 mill $, chip of similar efficiency than those in S9, with chances of design failure to get it working as a system  / not working at all versus S9 which is already in existing market, well known (good & not so good experiences). It's bleak future for those chips.

Technology must be accessible by means of cost and availability. If it's too expansive, very less exposure to it's technology, least likely it would grow.
sr. member
Activity: 244
Merit: 280
I got the same reply from BF, $2M min order.

I have the ability and the contacts to produce the PCB and the machine, but the budget is far beyond my disposable cash.

Anyone who is serious, get in touch.  I'm wondering if we can get 50 units of the BF chip from some other buyer to debug the design.  Once that's done, there is much less risk is going to mass production.

As for starting a fab, no that's not possible.  I have been designing IC's for 15 years, that is not feasible.  Better to buy a used fab from a company going fabless.  BTW that's also not feasible, but way better than trying to build one.
jr. member
Activity: 54
Merit: 2
DAICO
Hello. We here in Russia also want to work on new machines, Bitfury B8, 5200 usd but minimum order 2 mln usd, now I put the machine on the boards, Bitfury with Georgia and Iceland on old 28 nm chips and consumes 6.5 KW of electricity, but you can disperse 20 to 28 Th, they fails there change to a new 16 nm. But how to buy nobody sells that sold me the grey party is not clear how and where brought. Maybe someone knows where to get and then I have a lot of energy of 1 MW to 4 rubles, and if to do with gas 1.26 ruble
jr. member
Activity: 129
Merit: 6
Long term HODLer since 2014
Been tried, didn't work then, probably won't now unless you gots mega$$ and inside contacts!

Hmm  Undecided I guess the circuitry isn't that complicated when I looked at my Antminer S9. Why does it take mega bucks $$ to do this?

Because ASIC chips are not cheap, that's it. Once I've contacted a manufacturer and they said don't write us if you don't have 4M dollars Cheesy

I am seriously thinking about doing a group-buy of chips and making our own boxes. I'm seriously sick of being held at the neck by BITMAIN.

Who's interested? I think we should be able to group together $4mm (in a pseudo serious toneRoll Eyes
legendary
Activity: 3374
Merit: 1859
Curmudgeonly hardware guy
He probably meant design and have produced a batch of chips, not build a factory from scratch.

Leastways I hope that's what he meant.

All would change is knocking off a couple zeroes from the campaign - still pretty unattainable.
legendary
Activity: 3822
Merit: 2703
Evil beware: We have waffles!
maybe we can crowdfund our own fab.
Would make for a record-breaking GoFundMe....
Objective: Build stete-of-the-art IC fab for producing 16/14nm node Crypto coin mining ASIC's
Target to be Raised: $4,000,000,000
Time-frame for building fab after raising capital: 4 years.

Do you have ANY idea what it takes to produce integrated circuits?
newbie
Activity: 5
Merit: 0
From what I understand you can't buy the Bitmain chips direct.  You'd need to order miners with BCH and break them out.  I suppose there is a chance if the order is big enough, but considering demand far outweighs supply I wouldn't expect a deviation without paying a sizable premium.
newbie
Activity: 1
Merit: 0
November 27, 2017, 03:46:37 PM
#9
maybe we can crowdfund our own fab.
jr. member
Activity: 92
Merit: 1
November 27, 2017, 05:25:00 AM
#8
Only Bitfury sells chips along that companies. Minimum order is $500k and $7 per chip.
They were talking about sample orders but since last year there's no update yet. I think it's better to go their HQ and check.

You will have 71.4xx chips in total each can be o/c'ed upto 185 GH/s.

Not a bad idea, this is what I am thinking since a few months but I don't have that much capital yet.

If it's possible to get the chip, then is there anyone who can complete the puzzle to get the chip as working hardware ?
newbie
Activity: 3
Merit: 0
November 27, 2017, 03:19:45 AM
#7
Been tried, didn't work then, probably won't now unless you gots mega$$ and inside contacts!

Hmm  Undecided I guess the circuitry isn't that complicated when I looked at my Antminer S9. Why does it take mega bucks $$ to do this?

Because ASIC chips are not cheap, that's it. Once I've contacted a manufacturer and they said don't write us if you don't have 4M dollars Cheesy
full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 100
November 27, 2017, 02:18:34 AM
#6
Only Bitfury sells chips along that companies. Minimum order is $500k and $7 per chip.
They were talking about sample orders but since last year there's no update yet. I think it's better to go their HQ and check.

You will have 71.4xx chips in total each can be o/c'ed upto 185 GH/s.

Not a bad idea, this is what I am thinking since a few months but I don't have that much capital yet.
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