Topic: Cairnsmore2 - What would you like? - page 5. (Read 11589 times)

You have my attention aswell.

Interested.

I'm interested.

what is the difference between goliath and cairnsmore?

We are still playing with the Cairnsmore2 design that is our current testbed design and that is looking good. Out of that work we think a base module of about 1TH/s is practical size for us to build overall units out of and that is what we are working on next. Please don't bombard us with emails or PMs asking about the price as at this point we won't say and it isn't even totally set. I can say it will be set generally by a combination market forces and manufacture costs so you can make a reasonable zone guess from existing competitiion pricing what that might be. However if that market price doesn't meet our expectations we probably won't launch the product and just feed the design into our internal Goliath systems. Assuming we do go for public launch (we are still examining IP issues as well) pricing will be available at formal product launch.

Anyway point of this post is to get a straw poll of how many people might be interested in products at this sort level of hardware investment?

Couldn't have said it better. Am much more interesting in participating on this project (however Yohan decides, either as a customer or something else), than with the other options.

This x 1000000000. It was so unbelievably annoying having to unplug usb and power to cycle the boards.

As an aside. Will there be any kind of trade in policy for the CM2?

Spiccioli has had great suggestions. A reset button would be amazing. Even if Goliath uses FPGAs, if they achieve similar $/GH/s and GH/w efficiencies of what is on the market then they would sell well. Besides the delay on getting it up to effective hashing speeds and the occasional USB drop(down to once a week or so!) I've been thrilled with my CM1s. If I could just stack CM2s on top of my CM1 stack that'd be awesome.

Still really hoping you guys release a product rather than mine in-house under a bond structure. Or do both. There are plenty of us that would rather throw our money at you than debate over which manufacturer is more likely to deliver to our door in the next year.

Yohan,

can you tell us what kind of chip will CM2 eventually use? Still a FPGA or something else?

spiccioli

At the moment this is a test board but if we are going to make it a board for sale we will probably do a tidy up. The performance we get out of the technology is more of interest to us than anything. We can simulate and do all sorts of calculations to gauge the new chip operation and performance but nothing to beat having a chip on the bench working. We knew how good the CM1 cooling solution was so we just reused that for this test board and the main reason for using the CM1 format. It won't be long until we have the performance gauge and we will decide then our development path for CM2 and the Goliath systems.

Last but not least,

add a power cycle button, on CM1s you need to remove pcie connector and usb connetor to power cycle them.

Remove power from usb connector, makes life easier finding a usb hub and, maybe, a different usb chip which does not lockup when powering boards on like it happens on a couple of my CM1s.

spiccioli

True,

but now they have to rush it, since difficulty is already rising fast.

And they have to have chips which cost less than 25 USD/GHs (Avalon price of 1500 USD/60 GHs) and/or use a lot less power than Avalons


spiccioli

Gets the thumbs up from me 

The nice thing is that they've proven they can go from concept to working product relatively quickly.

Looking sweet Yohan, no need to re-invent the wheel  .

Don't leave it too long though, some of us have their fingers hovering over the order button.

I would much rather send my money your way than BFL's but time is money as they say.

As you all keep asking this is what what we are doing as regards Bitcoin mining. It is intended only as a test board for Goliath technology and yes it does look strangely familiar but you never know we might spin it as a product. It doesn't have the full Goliath functionality which is why we might sell it but it does have enough to be a competative Bitcoin solution. Please don't ask on the emails for more info or pricing as we are very busy currently. None will be forecoming until we are ready to talk more about what we are doing. Meanwhile enjoy!

Yohan

Here are my thoughts on this (just noticed this thread, had a busy weekend lol):

• Low initial chassis cost. Chassis includes PSU and backplane, and controller. Then you can add boards at a reasonable price per board. Allows a smooth upgrade curve. The challenge is finding the sweet spot in MHash/$ but while maintaining a low "per board" cost. You want optimal MHash/$, but you don't want your boards to be much over $2K each.
• Controller should use Ethernet. Make it standalone.
• Consider power density. We want as high a density as possible, but also don't want to exceed common power density limits. I would keep the unit's power consumption under 200W/U. So if you do a 3U chassis keep it under 600W. At current FPGA tech/bitstreams (though I'm hoping that with your skilled team you can come up with a better bitstream that milks more performance per chip and per watt). that means about 15GHash/s per 3U Case. With this setup you don't need to space out the gear in the rack, and can fit 14x rigs in a rack. which puts you at about 8.4KW of draw per rack, which works with most datacenters limits (but on the high end without paying a lot more) and 210GHash/s per rack. You can go higher density than this, but at that point you're starting to fight power density at the datacenter, and thermal density issues as well.
• Monitoring! You need monitoring of as many metrics as possible. Fans, Heat, Power, everything that doesn't blow up the price too much, you should be monitoring, and reporting over either webservice, or SNMP. So that existing infrastructure monitoring tools can manage the health of the cluster
• Depending on the cost of the chassis, adding an accessory later, allowing slotting of 1 or more cairnsmore1 boards into a "blade" for this new system would provide an upgrade path for those already investing in your Gen1 product
• Bitstream upgrade abilities over ethernet. Allowing remote upgrade of individual blades (without bringing down the entire cluster)

I'm sure I have more than that, but that's the main stuff I can think of right now.

Export costs vary widely by country where it is being imported and the type of equipment it is. The key to all of this is the harmonised code which is a system that identifies the type of equipment and then the customs processor knows what duty level is to be applied. Duty is different from local sales taxes. Most countries have a mechanism for applying local/federal sales taxes on imports so you don't avoid those.

For sales between supplier and customers in different EU countries duties have been totally eliminated but sales tax (Value Added Tax - VAT) still exists and we have a system that is not totally different from intra-state system in the US. If we are selling to a domestic customer in the EU we will always apply VAT to the price. If the EU customer is a business, with a valid VAT number, we can ship without charging VAT ourselves but it is still due to the authorities local to the customer. This is backed up with a reporting system so that fraud doesn't occur and we report every VAT free shipment to a EU country.

As far as I understand it, and this is complex, US duties vary with sourcing country of the item being imported and the harmonised code used. They also used to have an associate tax called MFP which is very small, 0.02% from memory, as well. Generally as a country UK items don't get hit hard by duty as we are a friendly country. VAT does not get applied to non-EU countries. The hardminised code that we use for most of our products is a fairly low duty, or none, but Cairnsmore1 may be different especially if we ship it with bitstreams loaded i.e. a known function that changes the harmonised code. We are looking at what harmonised code we can use for Cairnsmore1. Once that is established we will publish that. Most of the couriers have duty calculators so cost can be checked.

South America countries have very high duty levels from what we have heard.

My remark about sizing for 960W also applies to 240V circuits.


Actually a $10-15k pricing point is fine... The way I see it, is that as long as there are mining solutions at the following price points (orders of magnitude), anybody should be able to find something for their budget:
- around $100: entry-level/mid-level video cards.
- around $1k: quad Spartan6 boards, BFL single, etc.
- around $10k: BFL mini rig, Cairnsmore2 (hopefully).

yohan: for Cairnsmore2, please arrange the fans like rackable servers: placed at the front or back of the chassis (ie. not attached to heatsinks or FPGA boards).

I'm buying from enterpoint and I'm in the US? How much are export costs from UK to US?