Thank you to OP for starting this post and providing the needed info to move this initiative forward.
I live in NY and have a direct personal contact (a close friend, not a random sales rep) that works at Avnet. I would like to organize a group purchase as to hopefully benefit myself and the community and put us in the position to possible negotiate a lower price. My friend says he can work on expediting the delivery of the Xilinx VCU1525 (maybe by a week or 2) just for me. He said the original price of $4000 is off the table and the price is now roughly $5000 till end of June, and in about 2 weeks its going up to $8,000 due to the high/increasing demand.
I would also like some direct answer as to the project status if its ready to go and if I get the FPGA today, or is it still being worked on? I think most people would be happy to pay any dev a fee for a final working solution, right? As I understand it the Zethron website does NOT have a production version of what is needed to run this card only a test version? If someone could please clarify or summarize because there is 66+ pages of conversation and its hard to get a solid answer as to whats going on as of today.
Anyone want to jump in on a pool purchase of the VCU1525 please email me directly
[email protected] I have a brick and mortar store and my friend is local so I can certainly arrange to mitigate the orders as long as we have enough people onboard to give us the buying power needed to get some discounts before the price skyrockets out of control.
There are several discord channels regarding the xCU1525 ("x" means choose a letter, and the modifications are being made to the VCU1525 board specifically for crypto mining). You can buy these from mineority.io for $3600 and they will ship the card to you. There are some shipping restrictions based on your country.
According to their website (
http://store.mineority.io/product/fpga/ ) they have 1224 in stock (yes, I logged in and checked, no I have not bought one, no I am not a shill for minority.io). mineority.io is part of OhGodAGirl's company, and they are working together with GPUHoarder and a number of other FPGA knowledgeable people to make these cards and bitstreams for a variety of algorithms available, especially for mere mortals.
Fair warning, mineority.io only accepts crypto as payment.
mineority.io discord:
https://discordapp.com/invite/HnJSDf2When you join the discord, don't be the typical noob and just blurt out your questions. Read the FAQ, read the pinned messages, scroll backwards in the channels and see if your question has been asked (trust me IT HAS) and answered. Reliable answers in that discord come from people with their names displayed with colors other than white (pink, red, blue).