Topic: CoinTerra Engineering Update: Packaged chip and system board assembly (Read 1664 times)

i agree with testerx...  for units that are designed to sell to customers, liquid cooling in the box is probably the best option there is.   for units designed to be placed in a data center... more interesting 'mass cooling' systems are available...  including rack based liquid cooling...  (the pumps and liquid are cooled at a facilities level and the boxes have in and out ports with quick disconnect tubes)... and the ultimate... is the two phase immersion that 3m invented and asicminer is using supplied by allied control....   which would allow you to cool lots of chips simultaneously (and cool the other components like the dc/dc converters)

i think it'll be an interesting experiment to watch bitmine's effort.. which is the opposite of knc/hashfast/cointerras approach.  bitmine has used the same 28nm process but with a much smaller chip (25 gh) that they think they can aircool easily with just a small heatsink on top.   this could potentially be the cheapest to cool, if it works out and can scale... but theyve got 1/20th of the performance for each chip, which means 20x the packages, and maybe 10-20x the board space (the chip is smaller), 20x the dc/dc converter components etc.  and a lot more, smaller, dc/dc converters etc.  i suspect having lots of small chips, costs you more in packaging, and board and box space, and dc/dc converters...  but costs you less in not requiring exotic liquid cooling.    i would also wonder whether having lots of smaller dc/dc converters is less efficient than having bigger, more powerful ones... in the same way that bigger power supplies tend to be more efficient than smaller ones (especially if you use them under thir max load)

im eager to see the results of all of these asic mining options/experiments and see if one particular way becomes the more cost effective long-term to go.

i should add, that the small 'ant farm' type of cool chips approach has been done to death... by avalon, asicminer, bit fury etc... and has shown it works but has reliability problems... especially when all the chips are wired in a daisy chain together.  one failure of a chip or board or minor component tends to create mass havok and take whole boards down.  more 'parts' means more points of failure.

as gmax says.. cointerras is a very dense package.. so when youre paying for space in a data center, having more TH's in a 4U box is a cost advantage because you pay for both the power and space that you consume.

dont forget that each of knc, hashfast and cointerra... are using 4 dies in each of their packages.   it wouldnt take much at all for them to use exactly the same dies... but re-package their 4 dies into 4 separate smaller packages and redesign the board to take 4x the smaller chips if that ever became a better way to go.  but i suspect theyve already considered it.   Although, in ct and hf's case, each die is still quite powerful and is not going to be as easy to air-cool as the weedy bit mine or bit fury chips (each hf/ct die is 100+ gh, thus 60-100 watts).

and then what they all do for the next generation will undoubtedly be better than what they did this time around, because theyve all learned a lot.. and will put the experience to good practice.  the 2nd gen chip from each of them will be better than the 1st gen chip, in a more meaningful way than just the process shrink would give them because of architectural improvements.

I think it's easier to get decent contact on a small amount of cores in a package like this versus trying to ensure good contact on dozens of chips.  Yeah, the cooling system has to be beefy per core but since integrated water cooling is very popular now and reasonably reliable it's actually easier than trying to get proper heatsinking of dozens of chips.  Unless you're like ASICMINER and going with immersion, it's a pain in the butt to cool dozens of chips at the same time.

I'm skeptical about the wisdom of these very high power density in a package design.  It forces more exotic cooling. Maybe in the case of CT it actually increased the amount of hashing you could get per U of rackspace...  I'm surprised that the decrease in parts count offsets the more elaborate packages and cooling required.

I think what you are forgetting is that CoinTerra charged $14K for the initial batch of TerraMiners and that price was used to pay off the cost of creating and manufacturing the chips and the rest of the hardware. Unlike certain companies that jacked up their prices when there was a rise in interest and lied about how they were doing it because of the increased production cost CoinTerra, KNC, and even HashFast have lowered their prices down after their first batches have been made and shipped.

BFL on the other hand is still making a profit charging $1K per single and only REALLY increased their prices to get a larger profit while interest was so high and it falsely appeared to be so profitable. But mostly, April and March pricing being the same isn't off, it's fair because it is less than half of the December pricing, though those orders are clearly a bit late.

Also fun to consider: HashFast's chip is divisible into four chips, thus making their actual performance little better, if at all, than KNC when compared per core. And it appears CoinTerra is going to do the same, just while producing a four-chip/four-core-per-chip machine, compared to HashFast's four-core-one-chip stuff.

 April pricing being the same as March pricing does seem "off", but it's still better than CoinCraft and in line with KNC's pricing.

 No arguments with accumulating (and profiting with) Antminer 180GHs for the time-being; that's exactly what I've been doing since they became available, but starting to look ahead for Q1 purchases based on currently available information.

 Given that KNC is a personal non-starter for electrical reasons, other than Bitmain, CoinTerra seems like the way to go. Still keeping an eye on Black Arrow and will see how that stuff shakes out with their resellers once they start shipping - Have no desire to deal with Black Arrow directly with their current CS infrastructure.

Really?  Recent hashrate growth appears to be 2%/day. The end of April would be 20 days from now. 

$6000/2000GH/s_april = $3/GH/s_april
$3/GH/s_april * 1.02^(4*30days) =  $32 GH/s_now.

Unless you think the April units will come substantially sooner than 120 days from now or you believe that groth will be less than 1.25%/day you'll be better off buying the bitmain antminers which ship ~now even at the too-high 3BTC/180GH price being offered to US customer (antminer buyers in china are paying 1.9BTC, which you'd need grow of less than 0.84%/day for a $3/gh unit 120 days later to be more profitable than).  Even at the antminer prices it looks like the devices will not break even. $6k for 2TH in April has very low chances, in my experience and opinion, of breaking even vs just sitting on coin.

I've got a CT order for January, and the gear is looking sexy indeed. But I agree with your initial price comment about the current prices.

Wish I found Cointerra earlier, by the time I did they were into March units...

They've been sold out of march units for a month now dude.

Oh, there are more pictures at the link, I almost missed that.

Dumb electronics manufacturing question: How is reflow done for boards with components on both sides? Is it done in multiple passes or is the solder paste enough hold the parts on without gravity's help?

As an aside, my SO saw the CoinTerra wafer pictures on my computer and expressed surprise that it was circular. She wasn't aware that the wafers were cut from monocrystalline boules and thought it was interesting when I dug up some links.

Nice work ! Adjust your March pricing to be competitive and you'll have a sale !

EDIT: I'm a tard. Was thinking of Coincraft. Not CoinTerra. Sincere apologies.

 $6k for 2TH in April means I should probably pick one of these up once they are verified in customer hands.

For our final engineering update of 2013 we are excited to share some photographs of the very first GoldStrike I ASICs in finished packaging, along with our GoldStrike I system board assembly.

Full Engineering update and pictures here: http://cointerra.com/engineering-update-goldstrike-packaged-chips-system-board-assembly/


Quite a beautiful sight: The first batch of GoldStrike I ASICs packaged and ready for mounting!

Everyone at CoinTerra wishes you a Happy New Year and a fantastic 2014!