Topic: BW 14nm Miners Update (Read 8973 times)

I think the A4 and A7 are being shipped to institutional buyers. That is much less service cost for the manufacturers.

All of them have been so vague with their estimations of when their miners are being shipped that I'd just give up and say that it'll take at least 4 months for anything worth mentioning to appear on the market for consumers. Bitmain's expensive-ass miner method seems to be working for them. Avalon's looking promising, but then again, we never know. Innosilicon actually looks pretty decent as of now, but unless they delay any further, they're in the Avalon boat.
Huge lull in new miners as of now that aren't bitmain, not the best situation.

Innosilicon - once they actually start shipping the A4.

 Avalon - if and when they actually release the A7 and start shipping it.

 Bitmain has just been taking advantage of a TEMPORARY "no significant competiton" timeframe.

I don't blame them. Bitmain is the only company willing to sale to small miners. Look at all the crap they take from people on this forum. If it wasn't for them small miners would be a thing of the past.

that is right. So the miner producers would like to sell the miners to big farms. As the support requirement is much lower.

That's a good point, but the cost of customer service is usually accounted for in the price difference between consumer and enterprise pricing. Very curious to see how this all plays out.

The primary reason is that the after-sale support is distinctly different for individual purchasers and large installations. Individuals many times have problems that really have little to do with the actual mining hardware. Could be Power Supply, Internet access, cooling, whatever. They also have to worry about individual repair and parts replacement. Most of the issues go away when it's a larger enterprise.

I guess that's something that I've never really understood, money is money who cares whether it comes from the hobby miner or the massive Bitcoin farmer? That would be disappointing if a avalon stopped selling to the public.

Don't hold your breath for the Avalon 7.

 (1) Caanan was VERY late to even start development on 14/16nm - they'll get there per their latest announcements, BUT
 (2) There is some significant question if their new owner will let them continue to sell to the public (no definitive announcement either way on that).


 I'd guess 4Q and likely LATE 4Q for an Avalon 7 to go on sale, IF it happens.

Hopefully the Avalon 7 changes that.

Im very surprised as well, even B16 0.15 J/GHs effeciency is 50% worse than the S9. I thought asicboost improvenment (or how they call the patented modification) gives only around +20%. Very interesting, and the S9 looks like it is going to be the most effecient gear for very long time.

They're still trying to pay back the cloud contracts on B11 and B12 so I guess they are just mining internally.  They've been saying any public miner sales will be listed on the website since December 2015 so I wouldn't expect it.

I emailed them again:
They answered:

which beats the s-7 and loses soundly to the s-9

this is a 'free' power miner.

I think  July is going to be a waiting game for price and diff movement.

Except this does 5 Th/s under 1000 watts

Lol. Same thoughts exactly.  Seems why reinvent the wheel. I just wish we had someone with something to compete with s9.

Best regards
D57heinz

OMG, i'm the only one that can see the same case style, the same heatsink and the same design hashboard and configuration than S7(135 chips)/S9???

I think it's too early today for me... 

If it would be possible to get efficient results with undervolting and underclocking, it would be tempting  

In March 22 I asked BW.com if they are going for a public release with their miner and this the answer I got, I posted it in this thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.14280444

could be competitive if they price it below $440. Do they sell internationally?
If so, instructions have to be in English.

BW.com B11-PLUS
https://www.bw.com/pool/miner


I'm surprised that with the 14nm process it is so less efficient than the S9.
It is more like a competitor for the S7 and the Avalon6.

Of course we must keep in mind that this is not the newest miner from BW.com.
The latest one that I've heard of is BW.com B16, but I haven't seen any pics or detailed specs about it.
All I know that the advertised efficiency for the B16 is 0.149J/GHs.
https://www.bw.com/bsixteen

https://www.bw.com/pool/miner
So pretty! HOW MUCH?
WHERE CAN ONE GET THEM?

Looks like we won't be seeing this miner in june. I was really looking forward to it.

That sounds about right....  I have one of the later batch 600M with fewer chips;  It stays near ~965w @ 500Mhz doing ~3.4Th which comes to 0.283w/Gh
This is with a Coolmax 1600 Silver rated PSU.

my batch 2 is really good it can do .245 watts per gh with a quality platinum psu

it can run with .0001 error rate for weeks on end.

newer s-7's are about .291 watts a gh

Look at the s7 page it has a good graph at bottom: https://bitmaintech.com/productDetail.htm?pid=00020160510034707221GxQ3Yr280661

At batch 8 they perfected the lower chip and higher freq design.  This makes it lower cost to produce and should mean lower cost to us (in theory).  But it lost efficiency going with less chips and higher freq. 

What S7 batch is currently the most efficient?  Also what are some of the other batches that are at least good runner ups in efficiency / most profitable to be running?  I want to know what used ones I should look for if I am going to buy some.

BW's current chip is not - their announced LK-1402 chip should be a lot closer, as it's specced in the same ballpark as the "on video" Bitfury chip.

 I suspect there can be one more round of optimisation past those (and any similar chips showing up from BitMain and Avalon and Innosilicon etc) as folks get better aquainted with the 14/16nm FinFet type node and process, but I doubt it would be a massive huge improvement.

 At this point, Bitcoin mining chips are about to reach the current semiconductor "state of the art" past which there won't be any major improvements for a few years (when the NEXT node reaches production stage).



 Might not happen then, given the "almost no improvement" that happened at the 20/22nm node vs 28nm.

Ah, thanks. That clarifies things quite a lot for me. Could explain why Bitmain hasn't responded with their next model yet...

So my next question then is assuming BW's process is a good representation of the state of the art in processor fabrication, is die shrink now a dead-end for increasing efficiency?

You're also comparing CHIP efficiency to MINER efficiency.
The actual MINER is specified at .26W/GH

 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-new-sha-256-asic-miner-14nm-b-eleven-1340363

The BM1385 in the S7 is CAPABLE of getting down to something like .15w/GH on a CHIP level - but an actual miner will never see that due to the power needs for the bucks/power distribution, the controller electronics, the mining comp to RUN it, the FANS, etc....

The efficiency of the S7 also varies with the batch - the more recent lower chip count batches are LESS efficient than some of the early batches, as they're running fewer chips per string = higher operating voltage = lower efficiency (but higher hashrate capability abet at higher power use and heat level).

Your missing part where S7 is one of most consumer efficient miners for THIS generation.   Next generation that goes out the  window S7 does not stay at top spot forever.... likely bitmain has a S9 or something in works.  They are just good at keeping it secret.

On specs above it was mentioned no one has seen a BW chip that met later on specs.  But they were EARLY in generation  and only ones we saw were a few that somehow made it to re-sellers.  It was not really meant to be sold to general public.  But no doubt they will refine it... what it ends up being no one can really say  for sure.

Ok, so what's the bottom line on efficiency speculation at this point for BW.com's new miners vs. Bitmain S7?

The Bitmain S7 is 0.249w/GHS (per Hashnest's website) and is supposed to be the most efficient miner currently available to the public.

Bw's "Proclamation" on 2/15 says "BW-LK1401 chip is 160W/T, which makes it the lowest in the industry. Building on this technology the second generation, BW-LK1402 chips are currently in production with a lower power consumption of 95 W/T.BW"

Which translates into .160w/GHS and .095w/GHS which are HUGE jumps in efficiency.

I presume the former is the one currently promised for June.

Do we actually believe that these specs will be delivered. Has anyone actually gotten their hands on one or seen it running?

Would be nice to see a new efficient miner say .14 or so.

Frankly I wonder if these will  be like the s5 compared to the s3

A drop from. 0.8 to 0.52

Rather the the s-5 to the s-7. Which was .52 to .25

I have a batch 2 s-7 doing  .25 watts a gh on an underclock

I think it's important to give BW credit for what they have done. The B11 is the first real production 14nm miner it may not be ground breaking but as  QuintLeo says is close to the advertised spec, has been deployed in significant volumes for the Cloud hash customers which paid good interest during the presale stage and is now paying good cloud mining returns.

The jury is still out on it's successor based on the improved BW-LK1402, this being a string based design with an expected efficiency of 0.149GH at 195W. Now due in June with sales to individuals.

Rich

The B-Eleven may or may not have met it's early specs - hard to tell when there have been almost none seen in public if any at all, and the only info we have about the actual final hardware is a few pictures.

 They never announced ground-breaking specs for it though, even the EARLY specs were very close to the specs on the S7/BM1385 - and there is no indication that they did NOT meet or achieve very close to those specs (other than the 3/5/10TH miner part which DOES appear to have changed) on the actual miner.


 The LK1402 is what's going to make things interesting though, if they can achieve THOSE specs or very very close in the timeframe they're talking about - *IF* they actually start selling the things to someone other than "the big farms" and using them internally.

I don't think BW hit specs though from what we saw on the few that made it to resellers it was close to A6/S7 on efficiency.   But it was a early batch of chips... what they can do now hard to say.

We just know they have not shown one that really breaks current gen efficiency to general public at least.  I don't know what they have internal ... so hard to say.

BFD...  They are not selling them.

There appears to be a new competition for the smallest ASIC chip that can be produced.

The BitFury chips have hardly been on the market and there is already BW that is overtaking the powerfullness of the BitFury Chips.

The new development is quite interesting from BW as they are a similar company to BitFury and are one of its biggest rivals.

You can get good power rates in the US for small amounts of power.

ah so a casual miners will not have a cheap electricity, like i was thinking, you need a special contract for sitting on a 0.05 cent or lower

i guess those special contract are done only to those that need a big amount of kwh

then iceland or kuway are a better place for mining, since the electricity there is cheap for everyone regardless of your kw usgae

And don't forget these mega mines have a very good relationship with the electric companies.  They normally find a place with a lot of extra electricity and I think have a rate locked in before investing a ton in a bitcoin mine.    So buying unused electricity in huge bulk, they will get the low side by far.

Now residents they are going to be higher obviously. And as most places it is a wide variety based on location and usage.

For the residents, the price is from $0.09 to $0.2 per Wh. It depends on the usage. If it is over 4800 kWh per year, the price is 0.2$.

And lawsuits, lets not forget the lawsuits


As a very broad average, sure. There are higher and lower places although most of the lower places have been entirely filled now.

what is the price of electricity in China...?.. 0.05$ per kw..

Nothing that I have heard.  Last we knew they had managed to get new NM chip which is a decent deal.  But they reported it miss specced and came in around Avalon 6/S7 efficiency.

Also they kept a TON of these internally for their cloud.  A few made it to market I think price was high, but it was VERY few that made it to small customers. I think I just saw one re seller with it.   But there could have been more I just did not see.

Ant new news on the June release?

 

Also US we sadly don't have good track record for mining companies making the miners.  If we would have had a great consumer asic manufactuer on big scale, likely would have given us some edge.  But what have we had big scale, BFL? I mean BFL is biggest one I can think of and we all know how it went.

So China kinda wins on manufacture with having so many companies making it all in one place. And also having places with low electricity price many of the miners will never leave China.

 In the number, no.

 In the SCALE, there's at least one and I'm pretty sure multiple - MegaBigPower and Zoomhash both run some serious-size farms in Washington.
 They're just pretty quiet about that in recent years.


 I DON'T know of MBP is still anywhere near 5% of the TOTAL Bitcoin hashrate any more, but that was their target and they were mightly close to it for a long time.

 Zoomhash seems to be more diversified - the A2 gear they were selling off 'till a week or two ago seems to have come from their farm, as the ones I bought some months back were shipped out of the Wenatchee area. No clue if their farm is anywhere near as big as MBP.

Sad, but so true.

We here in the USA decided it would be a good idea if we got rid of all technical industry and manufacturing that made our country great at one time and let all that tech development occur over seas.

Plus there are no large mining farms in the USA to the scale or in the number that exist elsewhere.

Innosilicon has already announced miners due in June/July timeframe on the A4 (the one they wanted partners on 'cause they weren't sure it was worth doing, NOT the A3 they apparently didn't want or need partners on) - and given they stated they expected to have BOTH out at the same time, I'd be watching them VERY closely indeed.

 On the down side, the last announcement that included date estimates on the A4 also showed it to be a fair bit less efficient than their original estimate - implies that the A3 might also have ended up in the S7/B11 efficiency ballpark, which is NOT a good place to be right before the halfing on a new unit....

MegaBigPower has been a Bitfury shop/partner since early days.


21.inc has a "vision" - but ghods only knows what it really is.

KNC has ... lawsuits.

Spoondoolies has ... a bad deal on their merger that seems to be well along the way to killing them.

Avalons has ... no committment to 14/16nm at all as of a few months ago, likely they won't even try 'till it's too late to matter.

BW has ... an apparently in-production first-gen 14nm miner that is too little, too late - barely more efficient than the best 28nm miners - and an announced "second-gen" chip that is supposedly competative with the Bitfury chip, but a few months off if they don't have any issues getting it to production. If they didn't have LKetc backing them I'd be about ready to write them off - but LKetc has a track history of delivering reliable miners.

Innosilicon has ... an annouced Scrypt chip that's a game-changer, an announcement that they were working on a next-gen SHA256 chip but no specs for it, and quite a few questions about what, when, and how much. They're still out there though, and they're the ONLY major player left that has a business OTHER THAN cryptocoin mining to generate money for them (there's a REASON they're the only folks in the industry that never bothered with pre-orders).

Bitmain has ... dwindling sales on the S7, a large mine that's still profitable, a fat wallet from their sales of the S7 and earlier miners, and is working on a 14/16nm gen chip that could show up around the halfing, but they're pretty closed mouth so no certainties there on what and when - but I'm CERTAIN they will continue to be a player for at least one more generation.


BitFury has ... a demonstrated working high-efficiency chip, farms, and partners, but a lot of questions about "when" and "how much" remaining.


 Who wins?

 Ask me again in 2 years or so.

 8-)

Like it or not the truth is BTC is small not big and the oil or gold or silver is 3/4 gone come July.

So 21 mill x .25 = 5.25 million coins

At 400 usd we are talking 2.1 billion dollars left in the ether of cyberspace

So why should I spend good money to get the remaining coins.
Most companies do a calculation to figure an idea or model for building the gear.

The truth is for most companies it does not make sense to build the gear.

Let's say I have deep deep deep deep pockets. I want to spend 1,000,000 for chips and have  someone like sidehack build a lot of 400 watt 4th miners.
The viability to do this and break even is really difficult.  Plus no one will sell the chips to me. So where do I go bitmaintech or Avalon. 

I don't have 15,000,000 to build a chip from start and if I did the chip factories will still make me wait to make my chips.

I think this shows what sweet deals they are able to find on electricity.  It's hard to fault these companies for going with China, as much as I would like it to be more distributed. 

Think they can drive a semi from factory to plant with tons of new miners.  So cut down costs there.  They are saving costs and getting cheap electricity.  I don't see it stopping unless electricity prices go up.... then things change.  But a LOT of these business's have already made the initial investments and are just replacing gear at this point.

The question is, why have no large mining farms in places like the USA designed their own mining ASICs.   Where do they expect to get their miners from if they don't develop them themselves?  No-one is going to sell them the latest miners if the manufacturer can make more money mining themselves.  

Why has 21.inc no viable miner despite raising over a hundred million dollars? Are there any large miners in Washington State capable of designing a miner?

KNC in Sweden has shown it can be done.  Bitfury in central Europe, Spondoolies in Israel have also done it.

 

James Dangelo has an interesting theory on the mining situation:


https://buyabitcoin.com.au/blog/james-dangelo-bitcoin-mining-centralizing-worst-possible-places-china/

(The interview he does on the podcast Bitcoin Uncensored is pretty good, Chris Derose and Junseth do some tough interviews)

Here is a challenge to any company like BW that is trying to put on the persona that they support bitcoin decentralization. Sell all your gear to nations other than China FIRST to even the hash rate out. There are plenty of people ready to buy so the ball is in your court BW.

yeah  I was looking at f2pool stats  300 ph  and 270 ph is located in China  .  This is a problem I figure 60% of the worlds gear is located in China maybe more.

I really looked into f2pools stats  and of the 270ph in China 200ph is with big miners and 70 ph is with small miners

Assuming  Antpool is the same  more then 550 ph of the two are in china and at least 400ph are big farms

not count BW's cloud so more then 650ph in gear is in china

Selling out all your gear to Chinese farms is far from "committed to decentralization of Bitcoin mining"

They have not released this on the ones that are "sold out".  The original ones were next gen chips, but around S7/A6 specced on efficiency.  They fell pretty short but were a new NM which is still impressive.

These could be a lot closer to the B series announced specs from long ago as they have had a month or so.  We likely will not know though with internal use and big buyers getting them, unless a big buyer sells a few.

Keep in mind that BW.com is part-owned by LKetc, which has a solid record of producing reliable SHA256 miners (and appear to have had a hand in, or inspired, the design of many of the Innosilicon miners for both SHA256 AND Scrypt).

They're NOT just cloud.


 They announced specs months ago, ballpark .25 watts/GH as I recall - or about the same as the S7.
 They also announced a second-gen 14nm chip that they said would be in production in a few months, with specs fairly close to the BitFury chip of videos fame.


 With that said, though...



 ... you already did, with your B11 and B12 and in-process B16 crowdfunding stuff, though those weren't a standard pre-order setup.

so what are the specs, if they have already sold them out, they should release the consumption per hash at least, are those new device able to reach 2x in efficiency liek the s7 vs the s5?

Their website is a little tricky to manuever around.  As for their market it doesn't seem to be all that active, but you can definitely move small amounts of hash if you set the right prices.  I hold some B12 and haven't let go of any of my hashrate yet but will probably start trying to sell some soon.  So far the earnings from interest payment and mining income have been as advertised and my profit should come from the sells on the market at a reasonable price.  Hopefully around .45BTC/TH since it is going down some as the difficulty climbs and halving inches closer.

They might not have pre-sold gear.  But they sold hash for b-12 and such.  There were a couple they sold that equials quite a bit of hash.  I think they will come through on it most likely and all will go fine, but it's still pre-selling.

Not sure how they are against decentralization though.  They are one of the biggest companies on hashing power.

Tx for the headup! I guess those informations werent clear for me reading from their website. How active is the market? Is there an interesting volume?

This is wrong.  They sold out croudfunding for B11 on 10/12/15 and until mining mode started you earned .000312BTC/THS/DAY.  It has been in mining mode for over a month earning 0.00301410 BTC per TH/s or whatever amount it is for 1 TH/s in that difficulty period and you can freely sell and buy it on the market.

BW is currently the #5 hash producer overall accounting for 8% of the network in the world and #1 Cloud mining provider in China. We have a earned a reputation of reliability and quality service in the domestic market. BW looks forward to bringing the same level of service to the international market. Please take a look at some pics of the office, mining farm and a look at the first batch our 14nm miners.Also here's our recent article in Bitcoin Magazine introducing the history and business of BW.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/the-unknown-giant-a-first-look-inside-bw-one-of-china-s-oldest-and-largest-miners-1444675310

http://imgur.com/a/WHajz

BW will not take pre-sale money from public sales and is committed to decentralization of Bitcoin mining by providing high performance miners to the public. Unfortunately due to incredible demand in our home market from large volume purchasers we are not able to open public sales as previously scheduled in April.

I would take it as a grain of salt personally.   Looking are we talking about smaller cloud mining company?  I don't see them hitting a next gen miner in next month.   Just do not see it.

Have they asked for pre-orders or anything?  I just see a lot of red flags possibly here.

Not necessary - there are rumors that BitHash will trough on us a new miner in mid of May

If so - I will buy one

Regardless of how you pay, it's that no one can say what the halving is going to do to network hash rate and difficulty and what that means in how long it would take a brand new machine to pay itself back.  I tend to think most people would just wait to see what happens first.

I get what you are saying and completely agree. After halving btc could jump significantly and you'd be kicking yourself.

Nothing is ever sold for BTC. Its always priced in USD

I think it depends on how they are sold. If they are sold for btc i think many will wait to see what the 1/2 does to the price. Would hate to pay 2 btc for something a month later could be 1 cus btc doubled in price.

Launching a new miner weeks before the halving seems like a bad business decision, I don't think too many people will take the gamble right then.  I bet the public release happens in July sometime after the 1/2.

Well daily distributed interest of B11 is 0.000312BTC/THS/DAY. Price is actually 0.76 BTC per THS at shop and 0.61 BTC per THS ask at marketplace. This is not yet mining mode (it will start when all crowdfunding goal is filled), this is interest mode.
Right now i woudnt buy it...just my opinion tho, when mining mode is active i will have a look at daily share per THS and eventually try to find a deal at marketplace.

They have produced some B11's already so not really pre-order scams.  They were mainly used internally vs sales, they also did not hit near efficiency as the refined one should hit.

They should be legit on BW.  That being said I still did not order any of their hashing contracts, but I would put them as second behind bitmain as far as reliability as they should come though.  But time will tell.

Pre-order scams do not work any more.

See https://www.bw.com/news/show-81

"BW would like to take this opportunity to update the status of our 14nm miners. We are very pleased to announce that the first batches of our 14nm miners have been completely sold out. The demand from our valued customers has been tremendous. In the last few months BW has been able to successfully complete crowd funds for our B11, B12 and have nearly reached the goal for our latest offering B16 Hash Investments. We have also fulfilled the pre-orders from our top customers who requested large volumes of 14nm miners.

　　However, with this very positive news we must also unfortunately update that BW will be delaying the public sale of our 14nm miners until June 2016. At that time customers from around the world will be able to purchase the 14nm miners at BW.com. We are also now taking orders from interested parties on large volume orders for June delivery.

　　BW would like to once again thank our valued customers for their early support of the 14nm miner project. BW will continue to strive to provide the best technology and service the mining community deserves. We sincerely appreciate the interest we have received from the community and we look forward to serving you in the near future."

Thoughts!!!

Especially from anyone using the BW cloud mining.