Topic: CoinTerra announces its first ASIC - Hash-Rate greater than 500 GH/s - page 96. (Read 231016 times)

Frankly sir, that's bullshit.

You are lapping up slick marketing, not analyzing actual facts.  Last I checked, a fancy pedigree hashed at zero GH/sec.

If they really "have the best team of elite engineers out of all the asic mining companies" why

-  did they make claims about the physical performance of their chip (GH/W/sec) before logical design was even complete?

-  have they fallen behind schedule on their supposed "first week of October" tape-out?

Did they even raise the $5 million needed for 28nm NRE?  Or did ScamGarden, LABscam, ACTIVEscamming, and IceDrill IPOs exhaust investors before Cointerra (and CryptX) had a chance to get started?

They have the best team of elite engineers out of all the asic mining companies. That is what you are paying extra for, not for hashing power.

I think it would be nice if cointerra could confirm that tapeout has begun.  I know they don't post on these forums, but perhaps a blog post or newsletter would be good instead?  Or a tweet...?

Will

probably somewhere between 2 and 5 million dollar. first batch is 2 PH, do the math

how many pre-orders do they need to sell to cover their cost?

it's a sunk cost all right, and easily covered by the first round of preorders.

when youre making low volume production, the cost of the NRE is your biggest cost.  if you ignore that, how do you even afford to make anything?  it doesnt just factor in your P/L.  its a cost.  and its an up front cost.  its not a 'sunk cost'

spare me the economics 101. you said they couldn't sell it any cheaper because of "all the stuff that's in the box", not because  of sunk costs.  in reality, they can produce these boxes for little more 10% of their price., and sooner or later they will (have to). sunk costs won't change a damn thing about that, they will only factor in their profits/losses.

its not the production cost of the asic thats the problem, its the NRE and mask setup costs.  The fab charges these costs before it makes a single chip.  These have to be amortised by the number of chips you're going to make and is the main reason that these asic cmopanies charge for pre-orders - so that they know how many chips to order, and so that they have enough cash to place the order.  If we assume that the design cost is $1-2m, and the NRE for 28nm is $3-4m, then you have to amortise $6m over however many chips you make, and in the bitcoin mining world - and with these high performance 28nm asics - the volumes are relatively low.. so youre talking thousands not hundreds of thousands of chips.

lets say for arguments sake, you only make 6,000 chips in its lifetime (in cointerra's case, with each chip being 0.5 TH, thatd be a total of 3 Petahashes).  Theyve announced 2 PH so far at least so 3 PH isn't a bad estimate)

lets say that youre amortising $6m over 6,000 chips, so that means your NRE & other design costs are about $1000 per chip.. plus the manufacturing cost, which is probably a couple of hundred per chip (or more, if you pay extra for the 'rocket run' where they make them in 2 months instead of 3 months and charge you a lot more)

So clearly, it makes sense to make more chips and spread the NRE costs over a larger number of chips, but anyway, i hope im showing you that at $3/GH for complete systems.. theyre really not making much margin and it explains why most of the others are charging more like $6/gh.. and for them to get to $2/GH selling systems is practically impossible (unless they decide to sell bare chips)

so you think it costs 1000 plus asic? in that case I'm not even going to.bother disprove you. what do you think the production cost of such an asic is?

Of course you can buy a barebones PC for cheaper.  but we're not talking about a PC here.  A PC doesn't hash at the performance we want.   We're talking something 500-1000 times faster at hashing than the fastest PC you can buy.   Youre living in fantasy land if you think 'cheap' pc components are whats inside cointerra's box.   While i think youre on the right track with pc components, i think you have aimed very low on the spec.

For a start, every 28nm asic company's hashing chips run a lot hotter than any Intel chip.   And in this box we're talking 4 hot chips, not just one thats in a PC.   Intel's $45 liquid cooling is designed for 125 watts TDP.  Presumably its got a bit of extra margin in it, but its not designed for the 250-350 watts that the cointerra chips will be putting out - 24/7 in the bitcoin hashing world.  You'd need industrial strength liquid cooling not just cheapo liquid cooling.   Intel's not a purveyor of the best cooling solutions and never has been.  For those, you need to buy from specialist third parties. like CoolIT and AseTek (who make the Corsair and NZXT liquid cooling systems for instance)

Then there's the power supply - another expensive thing you underestimated.  Add up 4 hot chips running at say 300+ watts... And you get to what?  1200 watts minimum?  And what if we want to overclock them?.. Shall we allow for up to 1600 watts?  And what about the other stuff thats in there... the fans, pumps, controller and whatever else might be inside?   Shall we say its closer to 2000 watts max?  Or more?   Now look on newegg and find a couple of psu's that delivers that wattage and tell me you can buy them for $50.  Im seeing power supplies in the $300-400 range that deliver that power.  And 4 cooling systems is north of $300 too.  So we're on $600+ and we havnt included a controller nor any fans yet.  Nor a case.   In fact, im not even sure i can buy all the bits that we need for under $1000 (not including cointerra's hashing chips), so in short, youre way off base talking $150 cost.   Do the math!

LOL. You dont really believe that do you? You can buy barebone PCs which contain far more PCB, cables, connectors and stuff for $150 in retail. A liquid cooling kit from Intel costs $45 retail.

While it may be possible for them to sell you chips at a lower price if they choose to, i really doubt they can sell any 'systems' lower than $3/GH because of all the other stuff thats in the box (case, power supply, cooling (fans, radiator, pumps), pcbs, controllers, sockets, cables etc).

They should offer even lower prices now. I want to buy a Terraminer IV. Gimme $2/GH and I'll get 10 units or something.

Does it even matter if they are on track? Even $3/Ghash for an early Jan delivery does not return $3 in 12 months at 30% jumps.  A few % lower and it works out, but a few weeks later - and no one has delivered on time yet - and your back to losing.

there is none.

I missed the previous posts. Where is the tapeout?

For what it's worth, CoinTerra have been talking to me about their MCU protocol and I have been working on a preliminary driver model for them, so they have most definitely not disappeared. I suspect they're approaching the communication via forum aspect differently to other manufacturers.

Yes update would be nice, are u still on track?

LOL!

They were supposed to tape-out in the first week of October; an update would indeed be a good thing.