Topic: CoinTerra announces its first ASIC - Hash-Rate greater than 500 GH/s - page 95. (Read 231002 times)

B2, B3... and chips. Need I say more? How about selling the chips out the backdoor and delaying shipments so they could mine more using their units? Seriously 300 vs millions of dollars is no debate on gouging or hashrate fixing. See BFL for the same plan.

I thought most of Avalon B1 owners got a healthy positive ROI calculated in BTC or Fiat.  Guess those were the luckiest ~300 miners to date? Sad really when put in that context.

Greed? What about profit for the company producing the chips and miners?

I agree up to a point about 'gouging' customers like asicminer or avalon or BFL did but given that there is really no where to lower the costs of production of chips, boards etc everyone now has to accept this is an era of mine at a loss or to break even given the numbers. The only way to skin this cat is for everyone to work together to set quotas not unlike the OPEC nations do and limit that hash rate so that miners can get some income, but we know that is not going to happen. Let us be fair and recognize that there are some companies making a good effort but at this point there is no likely relief from losses on mining. We all know where this will lead to a potential collapse of mining entirely. I suspect 28nm chips will have some fire sales attached to them come 2014 and the writing is on the wall especially for those who have not shown any data / proof of chip design and production.

They won't deliver on time and even if they did the diff will be so high that ROI will be impossible.

Just like every other ASIC vendor the greed is too strong to do the right thing for the customer.

Avalon, BFL, KNC none could deliver a product that returned more than it cost and CoinTerra also will fail.

There is no debate.  Don't think KnC's customers "won" just because they launched before CoinTerra and HashFast.  KnC may have won, but not their customers.

Nobody is a winner in this new era of climbing difficulty.  That is the sad truth.  Get your refunds if you can get them.

CoinTerra.... .... come out come out where ever you are.

It's easy psychology to understand, if you think about it.  

If there were X companies, each with an in-hand product, a price, and a performance, then there would be nothing to talk about.  Different strokes, different folks, maybe, but just everyone optimizing their utility over the set of alternatives.

The pre-order model has made this akin to a sporting season.  You follow your favorite team, win some, lose some.  You speculate on the team rosters' relative skills.  You tune into sportsbitcointalk forum every day to check out the day's box scores.  And, soon you're an emotionally invested fan, supporting your team, win or lose, and trashing the competing teams.

this whole debate won't be settled until cointerra announce how far they are with production, which they seem reluctant to do - hopefully they will do so soon since the faith in their company directly affects their bottom line.

Until then, there's not much point arguing without any facts.

Will

   Running away are we?  You can't win the debate based on facts, so you change the topic to personalities.

And here we thought you wanted to have an intelligent discussion.

Actually it's obvious you don't when you intentionally misstate simple things like 'Friedcat != ASICminer' and '1 billion registers times 400GH/sec must = 400 billion transistors.'   

Huff and puff all you like, it won't help Cointerra get their RTL done or tape-out any sooner.

Go ahead, muddy the water until those you are trying to fool can't follow WTF you're talking about.  It won't help Cointerra design their first 28nm chip from scratch, or help OpenSilicon do their first original 28nm layout.

Throwing some ARM IP on an SOC for Samsung's Hitler phones is simple, even at 28nm.

Designing an entirely new chip, coding the RTL, and getting the physical architecture done correctly is totally different matter.

Cointerra has just realized this, that's why they've STFU recently.  Perhaps you should join them in being conspicuously silent?   

Neither Friedcat nor (afaik) bitfury ever even designed an asic. Any asic. friedcat did get help from some people who did with experience in... embedded soc's.

This "high power" "400 billion transistor" FUDis just that: FUD. Copy pasting a single hashing core a few hundred times isnt exactly the hardest thing on the planet, especially not when compared to laying out a modern SoC with half a dozen clockdomains.  And if anything, designing for low power is what really takes skill and experience, its the hardest thing there is.  High power is a pretty simple problem by comparison. Lastly, designing for 28nm also isnt meaningfully harder than for other process nodes. The fabbing is a different story, but thats done by tsmc/GF/whatever. Being ex samsung, they are likely the only bitcoin asic designers with 28nm experience.

Anyway, its clear you have an agenda here, and Im getting really tired of this mentality of rooting for one company and fudding all the others (wtf is up with that?), so your ignore button is about to get a bit more yellow, spare yourself the trouble of answering.

Not all Bitcoin ASICs are the same.

You can't compare friedcat's first gen ASIC and bitfury's second gen ASIC to HashFast's 3rd gen ASIC.

28nm is nothing like the larger feature sizes, 1 billion transistors pumping out 400GH/s is nothing like tiny previous designs.

Cointerra's credentials are most certainly an argument against them. 

Their expertise is throwing the IP Samsung licensed from ARM onto a SOC.  Low power, low gate activity ratio SOCs, not huge hot high-performance 3rd gen Bitcoin ASICs.

Worst of all, and most damning to Cointerra's reputation, is that they intentionally misrepresented their limited expertise as expert level guru wisdom.

Nobody made Cointerra say they were going to tape out first week of Oct.  They said that to get your money, and you believed them. 

Every hour that passes beyond their self-imposed deadline is another blow to their already limited credibility.

yeah because designing a bitcoin asic is so complex, asic design neophytes like friedcat and bitfury could pull it off.  Heck even BFL did it, eventually.

Seriously, you're being ridiculous.  Nothing guarantees CT will deliver on time and on spec, but their credentials most certainly isnt an argument against them.

Cointerra said they were taping out the "first week of October."

That is a fact, not an opinion.

It's now the second week of October.  Again, that's a fact, not an opinion.

Here's another fact: we have not heard a peep out of Cointerra, much less seen a press release from OpenSilicon (their supposed physical design partner) about NRE and/or tape-out.

Now let's move from facts to my personal opinions.

I already explained why making claims which can only be validated by physical emulation are wishful thinking when logical design has yet to be completed.  Therefore their numbers are being pulled out of their ass.

No, I don't think Cointerra can write RTL worth shit. 

Their expertise is in low-power, low gate activity ratio SOC chips for toys like phones and set-top boxes.  A completely original (not 99% Samsung-licensed ARM IP) massive billion transistor Bitcoin ASIC is beyond their competence level.

Agreed, KnC originally promised 2.5 watts/GH, then it was promised at 1.4 watts/GH.. and now in the final version, theyre pretty much on 1 watt / GH.  so theyve done well and managed to lower the power consumption of the final design (bucking the trend set badly by BFL).

Hasn't is the right word. They over delivered!

its not even worth arguing with you, every statement youve made is plain wrong (troll-worthy).  tell you what, lets just do a bet.  you tell me how much you want to bet that cointerra wont tapeout within the next X (shall we say 10? days..  if not, you decide the number of days) and i will seriously consider taking your bet.  we are expecting them to tapeout imminently.  yes, they are behind by days from when they said they would, but i dont think theyre as far behind as you are making out.

you know as well as i do that by the time of imminent tapeout, they will clearly have got far enough in their physical design process to be pretty confident of their power consumption and performance figures as accurately as anyone else could know theirs.

You are also under the mistaken impression that the asic design must follow the fpga design - which in knc's and hashfast's design was the case, but in cointerra's example   the fpga actually came after their asic design was complete and was used for a different purpose - not to prove the design - though it did that - but to debug the software effort.

you really think cointerra cant write rtl code worth shit?  thats your honest opinion?   based on what?   Do you think cointerra's specs have been pulled out of their ass?  dont you think there's every chance with the background and experience these guys have that theyre professional asic engineers who know what theyre doing.   and they appear to have performance and power consumption figures that are materially better than their peers.  they didnt achieve those by accident now, did they?  if their competitors couldve hit the same performance, dont you think they would've?

(cypherdoc, cointerra's rtl design was done in austin, its the physical design that was done in bangalore)

not only that, their design team is spread all over the world with the main office in India.

coordination is difficult.

Cointerra has barely started their logical design process.  They can't write RTL worth shit and it's already taking longer than said though it would.

We don't even know if the $5 million NRE has been paid yet.

See how happy they were to get a simple FPGA (logically emulating one or two cores) working?  HashFast was at stage way back in June!

Cointerra is nowhere near finishing their physical design process.  You can't do simulations of the physical design until logical design is complete!

All their specs (logical and physical) are ballpark estimates at best and wishful thinking at worst. 

Cointerra just looks at what HashFast is doing, and (claims to) one-up them without actually following through.

Show me the tape-out!

Simulated.
Wake me up when we see a real chip... KnC still hasnt delivered on their w/ghash, so why would anyone believe a non-taped out simulation?

i guess we're hoping we'll hear more news this week (and if theyre behind by a few days, well thats annoying but also no different than anyone else)...  and yes, its my understanding that they have higher performance and lower power consumption than their peers, and that it was validated and simulated during the physical design
process