Topic: "Condo" for your Avalon chips: Price Drastically Reduced! - page 4. (Read 17903 times)

I noted it...

Thank you SebastianJu.

Also, the Condos will not be located in Cebu City anymore. Electricity is too expensive there. The Condos will be located in Douglas County, Washington, USA. Electricity rates in this place are among the lowest cost in the world.

Ok, i changed it: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1998569

I will review what I wrote and make it clearer:

There are five Condo Systems on sale now at 1.34BTC per Condo Unit.
Each Condo System has 32 Units, so there's a total of 160 on sale.
Out of those 160 units, 64 have already been sold.
Therefore, there are still 96 left to buy at the discounted price.

The condo-price is the opposite of quantity discount?

Anyway... how should i understand this price. Is it 1.34BTC for 1-5 condos per customer or the earlies customers get this price only? So the normal cost is 2.54BTC? I guess the cheap condos are gone already then.

Looks like the Spartan-6 bitstream is out: https://github.com/BitSyncom/avalon-ref/tree/master/FPGA

Thank you, Avalon.

Most likely we will run out of time trying to craft an enhanced Control Unit. The USB connection to the Spartan-6 can be enhanced by replacing both the uPD720114 and the FT232 UART with a single CY7C68013A which serializes/deserializes to 16-bits. However, if there is no serious problem with the way it is now, and Avalon releases the Spartan-6 bitstream before we can complete ours, we will just use the original Avalon design.

This means we also don't have to do any Spartan-6 programming. We will just use the Avalon FPGA bitstream, as is.

It all depends on when Avalon will release the Spartan-6 bitstream ...

Yes, that's why we decided against locating in the Philippines. Also, your link is 2 years old. The rate in Cebu City is now about 30 cents per kWh.

Philippines = Among most expensive electricity in the entire world.

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/business/10/10/11/ph-power-rates-5th-highest-world

Recurring Expenses (including management fee)

1. Electricity - approx 3 cents per kWh (Douglas county, WA)
2. Internet access - shared with other owners
3. Space fee - 0.012 BTC per unit (10 chips) per month
4. Management fee - 5% of your earning (no bigger than what you would pay a mining pool)

Among all the countries of the world, I don't think there's any country that can beat 3 cents per kWh. (Maybe there's a place in Australia that is cheaper, let me know.) If you find this price hard to believe, here is the link to the Douglas county PUD.

If we simply put the power consumption of each condo unit at 6.6W * 2.82 GH/s, then in one hour it consumes 18.612 Watt hours, which is 446.69 Watt hours in a day, which is 13.4 kWh in a month. Therefore, at 3 cents per kWh, your electricity cost per month comes to less than one U.S. dollar a month (40 cents)! If you own a whole box (32 units), your electricity cost per month is only about $12.86 per month. The Condo Management System will convert this into BTC and charge it prorated from every distribution, along with the Internet access and space fees. The management fee of 5% will then be calculated and charged also. The management fee is not a fixed amount, which is good for you because then it would be in Centerus' interest to optimize your earnings on a daily basis. If you don't earn, we don't earn also.

EDIT:
The average electricity cost in the U.S. is about 15 cents per kWh, so compared to Anytown, USA, your cost in Douglas county is only one-fifth of the average. In other words, in most other places, you are looking at electricity expenses of at least $64.30 per box per month. So even for those who are already running their own Avalon boxes, it may make sense to entrust your box to us. Initially our operation will not be anywhere like a data center operation, but we will improve.

Now remember, if we become big enough, we can be our own mining pool, and you don't have to pay another fee for a separate mining pool. I realize there are mining pools that don't charge any fees, and its up to you to join those. The Condo Management System will allow you to join any compatible mining pool. You are in control of your units.

The Avalon SHA256 chip communications specs are out: https://github.com/BitSyncom/avalon-ref/blob/master/SPEC/A3256Q48-130507-V03-EN.pdf

I don't see any discrepancy between my description of the communication protocol, and the official description from Avalon. Except for the fact that the Avalon is much more detailed (at the bit-level), I think my description of it is a very good summary.

So now, on to Spartan-6 programming! We are using a Spartan-6 card that we ordered from alibaba.com to do our prototyping.

Thanks, wrenchmonkey. Nothing definite yet on the management fee. Electricity will be lower than 7 cents per kWh, but as of now, nothing definite on management fee.

This is looking much more reasonable with the recent price drop, but I have to say that without a statement of management fees being set, I'd still have a difficult time investing. "Minimal" is not a number. [/$0.02]

A couple of announcements:

1. The chip condominium will be located in the state of Washington. Washington has one of the lowest electricity rates in the U.S. Summer season is not too hot and short, ideal for Bitcoin mining.

2. We have begun looking into EloiPool mining software. The Condo Management System will allow each owner to connect his unit(s) to any mining pool that is compatible with the protocols implemented in EloiPool, including an in-house one.

The decision to locate in the U.S. instead of Cebu has been mainly because of much lower electricity costs in the U.S. It has nothing to do with "credibility".

One thing we have not determined is the cost of maintenance, and how much that would affect recurring costs. Best case is that the cost will not be more than how much mining pools charge, and Centerus will have to eat the losses until "critical mass" occurs. Critical mass is defined as that point at which the number of client-owned units allow Centerus to be profitable, charging only percentage rates similar to mining pools. The only way this business model can work is by making the clients profitable themselves.

Also, by the time you have your chips shipped to Centerus, we will have proven that we have a manufacturing system that works. We have not chosen the PCB fabricator, but when we do and everything is ready, we will schedule PCB fabricator inspections.

Does it make more legit if he uses escrow from John? that part is only fabrication of the pcb boards etc for the chip, but how about the long term aspects? You will eventually surrender the chips to him .. when mining start. Actually they want to host in the Philippines, but decides otherwise because of credibility and reliability issues and now shift to the US.

Don't know for sure at this point, but chances are I am correct.  

Just to summarize, here are the differences between the Klondike design and the Avalon design:

1. In the Klondike design, the task of subdividing and assigning work items are implemented in the cgminer driver (software). In the Avalon design, this task is performed by dedicated hardware.

2. In the Klondike design, cgminer communication with the hashing units go through USB via the PIC. In the Avalon design, dedicated serial wires are used to accomplish that communication.

The decision in any on-board communication design boils down to having dedicated wires, or using unique addresses and having a bus-like structure (as in I2C). For me the USB is not a good choice because it uses both dedicated wires and unique addresses. It's appropriate for out-of-box connections, but maybe overkill for in-box connections. However, designing systems is more of an art than pure logic. What may look elegant for you may look ugly to me. In the end, what matters really is when the rubber meets the road, which design turns out to be faster. Or the differences maybe negligible and all this discussion is for naught.

If you bought a number of chips, what you need to consider are the risks you are willing to take with your chips. The Avalon design is a proven design.

Also, we test your chips as soon as these arrive at the fabricator. We will let you know if any of your chips are non-functional. These chips have been tested by TSMC before these were delivered to the buyer, so the chances of any chip being non-functional is slim. However, we want to make sure, because after we accept a chip as OK, it is then in our hands and we guarantee its functionality to you. If any of your chips breaks from the time we accept it, we will replace it. We have ordered our own chips partly for this purpose.

So you don't know.

Thanks.

In the recently available Avalon specs, it appears that the serial output pins REPORT_N and REPORT_P are used to "report" completion of each chip's task to the Control Unit. All REPORT_N pins are connected together, and all REPORT_P pins are also connected together to a pull-up resistor and are then directed to an output buffer on the way to the Control Unit. We can surmise that the protocol works as follows:

1. During the initialization phase, the chips establish their identities using the daisy-chained serial lines. Each chip has a "down-line" chip, the next chip in the chain. It also has an up-line. The Controller starts the initialization process by sending the first chip its identity, say 0. The first chip takes 0 as its identity, increments it, and sends 1 to its down-line. The second chip takes 1 as its identity, increments it, and sends 2 to its down-line, and so on. Now each chip has an identity. Other parameters are broadcast down the serial chain from the Controller, like how much of a work item each chip should assign to itself.

2. Now to start off the chips on a work item, all the Controller has to do is send one message, with a starting nonce embedded in the bytes of a block header. The message contains other parameters, like the total number of nonces to be worked on.

3. All chips get the same work item start message, but starts off at different nonces, according to its identity and the total length of nonces in the work item. The chips then start producing hashes, checking each hash to see whether it is less than the target.

4. The first chip that produces a target hash pulls the REPORT_N or REPORT_P line down, and sends the Controller the target hash. At this point, all other chips in the same hash unit can stop their work, because a target has been found. This point is important because it means that the work cycle time for each hash unit is NOT constant. It can vary wildly.

(The question you maybe asking is: why an independent serial input line for each hashing unit? Each hash unit's line establishes its identity to the Control Unit, for one. But I think a more important reason is to allow each hash unit to be working on completely different, even unrelated, work items. I have not looked yet into pool mining protocols closely to know the answer, but if in a pool mining environment the work items can be unrelated, then having each hashing unit be independent of one another is necessary.)

5. The Control Unit pulls the next work item from a queue, and starts over at Step 2 above, JUST FOR THIS HASHING UNIT.

In other words, the necessity for the Spartan-6 FPGA or something like it hinges on whether all hashing units are coordinated or non-coordinated. They should be coordinated if the work items coming from the mining pool are large enough to be subdivided efficiently among ALL hashing units, and should be non-coordinated if the work items are so small that the system does not gain efficiency by further subdividing the work items among the hashing units. Put it simply: coordinated means its simple and the FPGA is unnecessary, non-coordinated means its complex and the FPGA is crucial.