Topic: DIY FPGA Mining rig for any algorithm with fast ROI - page 64. (Read 99494 times)

Each fpga device requires a unique bitstream. Think about it.

There is an army of anonymous programmers for CPU/GPU's so your risk is way lower. But FPGAs are totally different and a lot more complex. Claymore only recently started using Assembly in his miners and it gave him a small advantage. But C and C++ are a lot more robust for GPU's so he did not need to use ASM in the beginning. That is not the case for FPGA's.  yes you get C for FPGA's but they are at best rudimentary and VHDL and Verilog are very much alien in comparison. I doubt that GPU's programmers can and will make the jump to FPGA's. As much as an Engish person can easily learn Russian. both are languages but will require significant effort and mind shift!

The Phi algo change will test the theory that they can adapt the fpga soffware in a matter of hours or days??
Also I don't get why the engineering samples of these boards are cheaper and they can put them in mass production for a higher price?? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Hi,  I'm quite interested in FPGA mining since it's more flexible than ASIC and more productive than GPU/CPU,
waiting for the mining release for FPGA development kit, will look for the way to buy proper FPGA development kit.

I wonder if the FPGA with HBM2 will be the next way we could try? 
 
Found this product:
"BittWare’s XUPSVH is an UltraScale+ VU33P/35P FPGA-based PCIe card.  The UltraScale+ FPGA helps these demanding applications avoid I/O bottlenecks with integrated High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) tiles on the FPGA that support up to 8 GBytes of memory at 460 GBytes/sec."
 
Shall it have much higher hash rate than VCU1525 development kit (VU9P Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA)?
(Of course, the price and where to buy is also the important issue)

Im not alone in being hyped to mine lux with fpga
But as i just went for ti rigg instead il be happy if they succeed in making it resistant :p Just hope no one bought to mine lux if they do succeed, others pain is not my gain.

Well that makes me sad. Mining Lux with an FPGA was the only reason i was following this thread!

Re: your short story. I have shelled out big bucks for GPUs to run miners written by anonymous programmers I've never met either. How is that different?

Ok, this particular anonymous programmer has no public track record, yet. But neither did Claymore et al at some stage.

While it's winter where I am and I appreciate the heat I would far prefer to be able to run more miners on the same circuit and dig a heater out of storage if that's what it takes.

If you think that is the short story then you are just as confused as the guy you are replying to.

In those price points you won’t see 20+kh Cryptonight and 17GH/s Keccak

You’ll also be dealing with older chips - 28nm variety Xilinx 7 series.

But - you can get performance on par with similarly priced GPUs (at 10% of power)for most of the discussed algorithms. And that’s from a relatively new platform that hasn’t had near the level of optimization. I hesitate to give exact specs yet because things can change between engineering samples and shipping products.

Overall if you have $500 to spend and want to get into FPGAs you can do it profitably, but if you have $5000 you can participate much more profitably $ for $.

I think the short story is that you're supposed to shell out big bucks for hardware some anonymous programmer you've never met is going to maybe produce code for sometime that may or may not bring a ROI but they'll get their 4% whatever.

And if you think old asics are just space heaters, this hardware won't even keep your basement warm.

Specs ?

I missed something - who said multiplication and division are the same thing?  I mean sure multiplication by a reciprocal is the same as division but who is counting.

I generally have a distaste for arguments over semantics and pedantics. It is precisely why I don’t do much in formal mathematics. I fully respect and appreciate the value of and need for such rigour, but it is a means to an end and not the end itself.

Reference please.

I like you. Now take my money and makes public Bitstreams

Well, Chuck Norris is known to successfully divide by zero. Maybe he's posting here under an alias? Or maybe he had spread his knowledge of previously illegal operations to the "energy industry" or the "GPU hoarders"? Who knows?

lol yea multiplication and division are the same thing...come on guys

I don't think anyone here would get offended. I'm even grateful for your post as it helped to prove my point.

I'm also grateful for the correction below that is the other half of the proof of my point.

Do you have a source?

I'll take this as a straight question, not a rhetorical question. The answer is three fold:

1) due to other commitments I have not enough time to get seriously involved in such a project. At the same time I don't want to get tangled in some abandonware crapcoin, even if just part-time.

2) it is my observation that the publicly stated goals of majority cryptocoin projects are very different from the personal goals of the authors. It is a conflict of interest minefield.

3) the whole market of floating-point developers and users is deeply split in their understanding what does it mean to have "reproducible results":

3a) some want that their simulations differ very little or not at all. I'm more in this group and that is the approach to be included in cryptocurrency.

3b) others focus on the reproducibility of the end results, e.g. the launched missiles hit the evading targets or the cell phones keep the connection when driving in or out of the tunnel. Those people would laugh at trying to incorporate floating-point calculations in the PoW code.

None of the above two camps have monopoly on being good or bad, right or wrong. If you (or some other reader) is interested about the above split it is worthwhile to study how the Java language introduced the keyword strictfp.

Intel is definitely serving camp 3a). Nvidia is started in 3b). AMD started in 3a) but shifted into center after acquisition of ATI from 3b). FPGA vendors try to serve both camps, but have way more success stories in 3b).

Perhaps now someone else is mining by using these boards.