Topic: Cairnsmore1 - Quad XC6SLX150 Board - page 96. (Read 286370 times)

MPBM is the cgminer of the FPGA world.

cgminer is for GPUs and should stay that way.

Now every time he releases an update I have to download some bogus bitstream crap I will never ever use.

MPBM got backup pool, bitstream upload, switches MHz ( dynamic overclocking ) basically it rocks for FPGAs and cgminer is bogus for FPGA.

Just use MPBM !

MPBM is GPL too...

I've never own a FPGA miner so never used MPBM, I suspect many people use cgminer for that reason too. As cgminer's feature set is impressive, I doubt much would be gained by switching to anything else (I'd welcome a feature set comparison to prove me wrong).

I'm hashing fine with the usb drivers from Enterpoint and cgminer 2.4.2 from official source.

Me neither. That's way I'm asking Yohan's opinion on this. BFL is a shady company so I'm not buying from them. I rather quit mining. I bet we all can mine with FPGAs at least until the reward halving before BFL gets any ASICs to customers.

"This time" don't get your hopes up, I'm not going to cancel my order.

They can claim anything they want. They did the same with their first BFL units too, they were quiet a bit off what they first promised.
People still bought them, it took ages to get to market and people paid up front.

Like anything from them from now on, I'll believe it when I see results, and probably wait a long time to ever see it.
I'd rather stick with Enterpoint, if an ASIC model comes later it will always be from them.

Yes, ASIC is faster than FPGA, but it's not that much faster. So no I don't believe their numbers.

If anyone is actually considering cancelling, I will take your place in line.

@yohan: You (your team) are doing an incredible job.

I don't believe jjs post had anything to do with that. you are reading into his praise too much..

Yoan, could you give us your professional opinion about ASIC vs FPGA. I'm sure there are a lot of customers wondering if they should cancel their FPGA order.

Let's assume Cairnsmore will do 800Mhash/s. One needs 50 boards to achieve 40Ghash/s. This is 32 000$.
BFL claims they can deliver ASIC miner doing 40Ghash/s for 1300$.

If this is the case there is no point investing in FPGAs (or GPUs).


1) Is it possible to develop a working ASIC miner in 6 months?
2) Is it really that cheap?

I think they are just trying to scare customers to wait until they get the ASIC ready.

I feel Con's notification of infringement was more than courteous. He could have instead demanded they immediately cease distribution and comply or face loss of all license and legal action, for contrast.

Fully agree here!

johan you and your staff did an awesome job! Keep it going

I believe your products could get support from open source developer out there to add cairnsmore1 support on mining clients like cgminer or mpbm if enterpoint requests some help here.

Maybe this could help to concentrate on bitstream development.

Best regards,

a happy customer

I believe Enterpoint is providing top notch customer service in the development of Cainsmore so far. There are other FPGA vendors who have also provided excellent service and Enterpoint is at least up to or exceeding that standard.

It was made CLEAR that these first issue boards would not be shipped in a fully optimized condition. Therefore the $640 price point. Obviously those of us who are purchasing these will participate in the process of optimizing these boards. This is similar to receiving a beta version of a video game for free and providing feedback about bugs,etc.

Enterpoint DID NOT make you pay up front like some other vendors in the community. They asked for payment when the boards were ready to ship.

Enterpoint DID NOT suggest these boards would have a bitstream ready to go upon first batch of shipments.

Enterpoint DID make good on their development and delivery schedules within a reasonable margin of error.

Enterpoint DID keep all of us informed as to each point of progress during the manufacturing phase.

Enterpoint HAS continued to be open and honest in their communication about any problems/developments in the software/firmware.

I would hope the bitcoin community would be capable of showing a reciprocal respect by providing professional feedback as to what needs to be improved and continue to support this new vendor in a courteous manner.

Thank you to those that support us and understand that we are still in a development phase still only 50 days since conception. To moaners you are free to cancel your pre-orders for whatever reason. We are also free not to supply either if we feel that the unit will not be of use to a customer and or the support of such a customer is detrimental to our other customers. We will strive to deliver what is best for the main base of customers and that will take a little time. I think I said right at the beginning I said the target to have most of the development done was the end of June and hence the early adopter pricing until then. I don't think we have seriously deviated from what we have said we would do in any aspect. We will also aim to keep you all informed about the good the bad and even any ugly as best we can and that is an ongoing part of our business ethics. Fundamentially I think we have the best FPGA hardware platform in the Bitcoin market. You are free to disagree on this this. It's just my personal opinion.

State of the Nation time:

CGminer will continue to be updated and we will release sources. We don't have any problem doing that or any commercial reason to withhold those. There is no commercial value in them to us as such. This might take a few days.

Bitstreams - Are on-going but hard to predict progress in any exact fashion. Our same staff working on this have been involved in improving our line and same goes for CGminer improvement and it is a compromise between spending time on one over the other. Generally this is improving and the design team are pulling back from manufacturing related tasks and more time is now going to the actual development stuff. So far there is no reason to expect that we won't have a unit into the 700-800+ Mh/s if not a lot better.

Hardware - We are switching over to the smaller heatsinks now in production. There are still a few units with the taller heatsinks to ship so you may get one of those. Results with the lower heatsinks are pretty much as expected and thermal perfomance is very good. We will try the option of additional rear cooling in a couple of weeks time and that is likely to be beneficial given what we have seen with our thermal imager.

We are hoping to have an alternative stacking pillar aimed a push-pull fan arrangements later this week or maybe the week after. We still need to source a fan bracket for that and it is on-going and no timeline on that as yet.

We are hoping to fit in the first simple power distribution board design this week and to make some shortly afterwards. The performance version with Ethernet support I don't have a timeline for as yet or a even full specification for as yet. It will come in it's own good time.

Shipping - We are maybe 1 week behind on our schedule but there is a reasonable chance we will catch this up in June and we are working to achieve this. Fundamentially we have made a lot of progress this week in moving to a smooth flow line which can deliver much more.

Yohan

Shoot, like a ton of bricks lol.

[ copy of email sent to [email protected] ]

Dear Enterpoint

It has come to my attention that you are distributing a modified version of the cgminer code in binary only form from your support website here:
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cgminer_windows.zip

As the maintainer of cgminer, I am pointing out to you that the codebase you are building on is licensed GNU Public License version 3.0. The terms of said license agreement are here:
https://raw.github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/master/COPYING
which can also be found here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

In violation of this license, you are releasing binary-only modified versions of cgminer which also include a binary only blob to be used with your hardware, as well as completely removing any reference to the original license agreement. I am going to assume this is a simple misunderstanding of the terms and conditions of the licensing agreement.

I hereby kindly request you stop distributing cgminer in this illegal manner. You are obliged to provide links to the source code for all modifications done to our code and the source code for the binary firmware you include with this archive, as well as the original licensing agreement, should you wish to further distribute this code.

If you wish to provide support for your hardware with cgminer, there are 2 broad options:
1. Provide modifications to cgminer code directly to the maintainer (i.e. myself) to be included in the master codebase upstream, add binary blobs to the code upstream and provide a URL link to where the original source for the binary firmware may be found. This will be the easiest to maintain long term and benefits everyone the most.
2. Maintain a fork of cgminer with your modifications to the source and the source for all dependent binary firmwares freely available for download.

I hope cgminer support for your products can continue to be provided in the appropriate manner for your company and client's benefit.

Regards,
Con Kolivas

what does the enterpoint change do to cgminer? I'm getting 200mh/s outta my board now does it make it go faster?

Wait WHAT?!?

Yohan - source link now please.

Breaking the GPLv3 license agreement is not an option thanks very much.
https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer/blob/master/COPYING