Topic: Can you build your own machine using same processors as S9? (Read 2839 times)

There's some sketch out there...  but when you look back and think about gox, cryptsy, asicminer, butterflylabs, (to name a few) and then look at the landscape today.  I dunno maybe I'm wrong.

Because nothing is sketchy today

Lol - Those were the days.... things were so sketchy back then! 

Ahh, the Klondike!  I had a full kit of boards and enclosure go missing on me from a DHL depot in Germany.  Cost me 0.5BTC which was probably twelve cents at the time.  Sad times, I still have the chips that were meant to go on those boards in their little pink esd wrapped stacks.

Interesting thread!

I always thought if a couple of con men and a felon could do it (BFL), then it doesn't seem that far fetched to be able to pull together the right resources to build a mining hardware platform provided you had legitimate investor funds.  Back in the day, it was nice to see more collaboration; such as the Klondike effort with Avalon chips.

These are BM1385E+ chips, older tech. I was just using them to show that you can actually purchase small batches of chips from Bitmain for repairs.

You got a full reel of those, by any chance?

Also, what is the topmark there?  Looks like no logo, different from the machine pulls

Although it is not something they offer to every customer you can buy the s9 chips from Bitmain in small batches (and at a full retail price). They come in little rolls like this:

https://i.imgur.com/snqTzRi.jpg




Yes those are s7 chips, it is just for reference.

hahaha, post of the year.

Hello kind folks.

I also want to build my own miner.  And if we can make it generate electricity instead of using it that would be great, but I'm comfortable saving that for a future revision.

Today in the mail I will receive my very first soldering iron, a hot glue gun, and 100 units BM1999 fabricated by elves in the underground sweatshops.  With this combination the project will be unstoppable!

Shall we be collaborating?  Please send your qualifications if they are not already apparent, or simply  ignore these crazy ramblings of another internet troll!

 Buying the chips themselves is not a problem - they flat out ARE NOT AVAILABLE PERIOD unless you disassemble an existing S9 to get them (or R4 or T9).

 As has been mentioned more than once already, BITMAIN DOES NOT SELL THEIR CHIPS.
 PERIOD.
 NOT AN OPTION.

 If you see BM1387 chips for sale, they are either "pulls" or they are FAKE.

 Since Bitmain doesn't sell the BM1387, they don't see any point in making specs and pinouts and such information available.


 I am often a bit shocked that Bitfury still sells THEIR chips - but I suspect it's inertia as they've been working with "major mining farms" and just selling chips to THEM for years.

I'm pretty sure Apple does a lot of it's manufacturing in China.

Maybe because they're sick of having over-reaching corporations peddling their slave-labor wares at ridiculous markups. Which is obviously not the case when you buy an iPhone.

I would rather build my own because I like building stuff.

I wonder if perhaps the analogy of "building your own cell phone" might help with all the folks asking about how to build their own miner. After all, why can't they just order all the parts to assemble an Iphone?

Why are folks happy to buy a phone from Apple or Samsung, and yet feel they don't want to directly buy a miner from Bitmain or Caanan but would rather "build their own"?

Just wondering since I too grow tired of the repeating threads.....

no one is selling BM1387 chips direct. There's only one company that makes them - Bitmain.

I'm kinda confused by the responses in the thread except for the first. I've been looking for the pinout info of the BM1387 chip for hours... buying the chips themselves does not seem to be a problem (unless every single supplier is selling fakes). I would think the short answer to the OP is yes.... you just need the pinout info and some electrical engineering knowledge.

But since you don't know what the previous block is, or the time, it might as well be random. With those two things, you still need to find the nonce. It sounds like you think you have a way to get the nonce magically, without brute forcing it, or by doing some minimal work. If you had this, why do you need PH/s - the hash rate is only important if you are brute forcing the nonce.

Not random, sure, but certainly chaotic.

They're a crackpot who thinks they can find a specific set of "lucky nonces" that will be valid for new blocks - that's the "random" they were talking about. They don't understand how SHA256 works.

 There is "no competition" because the whole concept has nothing to do with cryptocoin mining, and is NOT APPLICABLE to doing cryptocoin mining.

 There is NO RANDOM to any cryptocoin algorithm - if there was anything random, the algorithm would not WORK.

 Whoever "PH" is, they appear to be running a particularly ignorant scam for this "speed miner", or their scam is aimed at the particularly ignorant.

 Intel and AMD are NOT "generic" - they just happen to be widely-available competing product lines with VERY similar capabilities and an overlapping range of performance.

 At least one of the ASIC miner chip houses (BW.com I think) uses Global Foundries as opposed to the more common usage of TSMC to make the actual chips.

 The foundries don't DESIGN the chips, they just make them to specification on contract terms (as they do for AMD and IBM and NVidia and Apple among MANY others - Samsung and Intel have their OWN foundries).
 The DESIGN of the chip is owned by the company that designed it.

 NO.

 The S9 uses a custom ASIC that only Bitmain has access to, and they do NOT sell chips.

 If you have a $million or so to wave under BitFury's nose, THEY will sell you their chips - then add a bunch more money to design a miner around them and start building miners.

 There is pretty much ZERO chance of "the market filling up with Bitcoin chips" - the current miner manufactures can't get enough chips to satisfy CURRENT demand due to limited foundry capacity available on the current 14/16nm node production lines (capasity largely already allocated under LONG TERM contracts to folks like AMD and NVidia and Samsung and Apple that go through a lot more wafers-worth of production in a MONTH than Bitmain could manage in a YEAR).



 "pseudo-random heuristics" have ZERO to do with cryptocoin mining.
 Nor does algebra - cryptocoin work is all about simple integer add and rotate operations, there is NOTHING complicated or random about it.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and hope English is not your native language.

Search for the topic ASICBOOST. It too was supposed to narrow down the chances of hitting the right number.
That said and right off the bat -- continue all discussion of that useless topic in it's finally and thankfully long dead thread(s)... AFTER 1st READING them that is...

Ah, okay. So you're trying to find a way to predict the output of double SHA256 given a set of random inputs. Good luck.

Also I don't think that has anything to do with this thread's topic, or with "overclocking".

I'll be honest, I really have zero idea what you're trying to do.

The statistical incidence of a hash capable of meeting difficulty criteria is approximately 1 every (entire world's hashrate)*(600 seconds). The difficulty criteria is self-adjusting to make sure this remains true. You can't just wave a magic wand over a Block Erupter and coax it into calculating more golden nonces. And you can't make it run infinitely fast before it catches on fire. And even if you could solve the meltdown limitation you'd be paying out the butt for power compared to new gear. New gear sells because it is quantitatively better.

Please spend a little bit more time reading and learning before trying to explain yourself, that way you can get a better idea of whether or not what you're trying to explain is remotely possible or if the words you're using mean what you are trying to say.

Overclocking works great until physics happens and your chips start to burst into flames. Also consider that MOS power consumption pretty much increases with the square of switching speed so your efficiency will fall off really fast. And then your chips will burst into flames.

CPUs suck for mining because they have a very few very generic cores so there's a lot of extra stuff running and very little of the right kind of math going on. Think about CPUs like idling your car to run a 12V inverter into a USB adapter to recharge the battery on your phone.

GPUs are better for mining because they have many less generic cores; there's still a lot of extra stuff but it's a much lower percentage of the total amount of stuff and there's more of the right kind of math going on. That's your small standalone gas generator into a USB adapter to recharge your phone.

ASICs are the best for mining because they have almost literally nothing except incredibly specific cores. There's a small controller built in that handles data IO, clocking and basic maintenance tasks, and the other 99.7% of the chip is a hardwired piece of circuitry custom-built to do exactly the kind of math bitcoin mining needs and nothing else. That's the little solar panel with a USB charge cable that plugs directly into your phone.

I think some of you guys have some fundamental misunderstandings about how mining chips work, or how the design and manufacturing process works. And then stuff like "generic Intel i7" contradicts itself - you can't go into a store and buy a non-name-brand i7 for your computer. You get the one Intel designed and manufactured, or you get nothing. Nobody else makes them, only Intel. Just like only Bitmain makes the BM1387, and only BW makes the LK1403. And by "makes" of course I mean "spends months and millions of dollars with a team of experts designing, simulating and redesigning, then sends the design to one of the exactly two open factories in the world capable of manufacturing". Intel has their own factory so they literally do design and manufacture the entire CPU. They just also sell them to third-party integrators. Most of the bitcoin mining ASIC developers don't, probably because they can profit enough already from making the entire miner and if someone else made a better miner with their chips it'd make them look pretty bad.

The foundries, in the case of Bitmain's chips TSMC, only know "how" to make the chips because Bitmain's designers figured out the design. TSMC just has the tools to manufacture. Bitmain's the architect, TSMC is the carpenter. TSMC isn't going to sell Bitmain's design to anyone else because they'd get sued up the butt and their lack of integrity would cost them a lot of business from the rest of the world.

You guys keep thinking about building these own miners thread after thread after thread, but you still lack the basic expertise in electrical engineering and/or lots of money to go through with the project, so these threads really start to be a lot of talk for nothing.

Basicly there are two guys here at the forum that I know can actually do the whole thing and those guys are sidehack and jstefanop.

So TSMC knows how to make these chips but will only build them for bitmain and other custom jobs. They don't have their own version of the chips for other miners.


I just wanted to make sure there are not generic of a ASIC chip. In regular computers, each PC manufacturer does not have their own chip, you have generic   Intel I7 or AMD Ryzen  chip that any person or company can purchase.

I guess that is why the graphic card industry are being snatched up immediately because that is the closest thing to off-the-shelf chips for mining. Otherwise bitmain and the few other companies hold the keys for mining.

I guess there is no way to like reverse engineer a chip using like a powerful microscope at a college to see what is going on right? I know when our the US military planes were captured by Russia, they were making their own copies of the plane including the imperfections right down to the bullet holes.  

Why do normal CPU( Intel & AMD) suck so bad at bitcoin mining? Why are graphics card's( GPU) so much better? I wonder if ASIC  just have less of what makes CPU suck and more of what makes Graphics card rock at mining.

If you were design a car to be most efficient, it would be different then designing a car that has the fastest 0-60.

AMD may be a Corvette
INTEL may be a Ferrari.
Bitmain ASIC may be a Toyota Prius

The Corvette and Ferrari will win every race but the prius will go the longest on the least energy.

So maybe you can't build your own prius but you can get a car that gets very good mileage by maybe putting in a small efficient diesel engine.

Is this a fair comparison?

China and Taiwan are the same thing. PRC owns Taiwan, just ask them.

Well yes and no.... Ja they want to at least know about other folks IP but at the same time they hold very tightly to what is theirs.

Why do you think that there are NO cutting/bleeding-edge Foundries in China? Because the chip customers be they Bitmain, Broadcom, Cisco et al do not trust that their IP will remain private. AFAIK the most advanced Foundry in China is still at the 22nm node.

However -- the Foundries making the current miner chips - in this case they come from TSMC - are NOT in China. TSMC is in Taiwan and don't you dare say China and Taiwan are the same thing.

Bitmain spent millions of dollars to custom-design and have fabricated the chips inside the S9. Canaan, EBang and BitFury each did the same thing for their respective designs. They hold the rights and they hold them tightly and it's only fair that they do so.

So yeah, if you wanted your own comparable chip you'd also have to spend millions of dollars to design and have fabricated; the other option is, you could go to Bitmain, Canaan, EBang or Bitfury and see about buying their chips for your own integration. Bitfury would probably be most likely to talk to you, and it'd only cost you about $1M upfront instead of $10M plus about six months R&D time.

So its an IP restriction on the their particular ASIC chips that prevent everyone from making their own version of the antminer S9 ? I did not think China subscribed to IP since they literally have copies of almost every product you can imagine.

So that is why the S9 is better than other dedicated data miners because they control those efficient high output ASIC chips and the supplier will not give them to anyone else.

Ok, I think I understand now.

Thanks. 

Things are always possible when you throw enough money at them. You will, however, not be able to go to the foundry and ask them to give you another companies IP.

I know regular CPU(suck at mining/efficiency), Graphics card (GPU) better, ASIC best which are custom chips.
However, I don't know if possible to build your own ASIC based miners. Can you call up these companies and say " give me whatever you give for the S9" or do you need like an R&D department and million of dollars to actually reinvent the wheel by having to  engineer your own ASIC chip from scratch.

yeah, every week we a new noob-dujour asking the same questions again such as:

Is it Profitable to mine?
Is it Profitable to mine now?
I wanna make my own miner.
I wanna make free electricity.
I wanna learn correct grammar.*

*not confirmed
 

I suggest you look up ASIC so you at least have an idea what you are talking about...
These are custom-designed/made. Foundries (other than Intel) that can produce the current 14/16nm node sizes: Samsung, TSMC, GloFo. That is it.

the chips are custom built for them.

if you got  the chips  with instructions  on the pinouts you could build a better miner.

good luck with that

Can you build your own machine using same processors as antminer S9? Is that a thing?

I think they use texas instruments chips if I'm not mistaken, I realized they are dedicated and optimized for mining operations. 

Are these purpose built chips something that comes from the factory optimized for mining or is antminer modifying them and re-coding them with some priority software to make them so efficient?

I mean, could you put together your own supercomputer miner using these same purpose built chips or are they doing something special that can't really be recreated?


Thanks.