Looks like Bittware reduced their standard warranty for the "crypto" models. I believe they typically have 1 yr mfg warranty on their products. Kind of disappointing the warranty was reduced that much for a $6k product.
Yes, a 90-day warranty raises a LOT of concerns. Has Bittware done stress testing and has some reason to believe the failure rate ramps up after that timeframe? I could understand a 90-day warranty on support issues with a 1-year hardware warranty.
I was in the process of arranging my finances to purchase a few cards, but if the manufacturer has that little confidence in their product, they're sending me a message I can't ignore. Even the Chinese manufacturers (with their notorious quality) give 180-day warranties.
Just for some background, we have been shipping this board for 1.5 years now, and have had almost no field failures. It has gone through full validation, including thermals. We manufacture in the US using a Tier 1 contract manufacturer. Our standard warranty is 1 year, we have some products with 3 year warranties, and some customers who pay for extended warranties. We also generally provide unlimited support, as our normal customer is one who buys 10s or 100s (or even 1000s) of boards. We have been building high reliability boards for decades, with one of our boards being used as part of the traction control system on the TGV (and all Alstom train and subway cars) for well over 10 years.
When this mining opportunity came up, we looked for ways to provide a deep discount as we know this community is very cost sensitive. We also have concerns with the way that these boards will be used for mining, mostly from an ESD point of view. Our normal customers install these boards in servers, and are in properly controlled environments with ESD protection taken very seriously. So we lowered the warranty to reduce cost, and for fear of the boards being abused. Perhaps we went too far lowering it to 30 days. We also limited support, however, our normal support includes helping people develop their FPGA code on our board. In this case you are using code already developed.
Note that we do have onboard monitoring for temperature, voltage, and current, with thresholds set to shut down the board if it appears to be entering a situation that would cause damage. We provide a utility (console and GUI versions) that you can use to talk to this onboard controller via the USB and see what is going on with all the sensors. Unlike GPUs and CPUs, FPGAs have no inherent thermal throttling, unless the FPGA developer builds that into their logic, which is very rarely done. FPGAs also burn more power as they get hotter, so from a power efficiency point of view, it is better to keep them cool.
As for cost we presented, while I know it seems steep for this community, this is deeply discounted from our standard price, taking into account the reduced warranty and support.
From what I can tell, Xilinx has a 90 day warranty on their devkits, which is what the VCU1525 is. I'm not sure how long they will sustain that low cost, we know of smaller board manufacturers that pay more than that for just the VU9P chip itself.
What is the VCCINT max amp supply on the XUPP3R? Seems like you only have enough power capacity for a maximum of around 130A vccint draw?
XUPP3R, 6Pin + PCIE = 150W
VCU1525, 8PIN + PCI-E = 225W
Ya, unfortunately you guys are bilkers aka 'how much you got?'. Though, not to be unexpected when your primary supplier and working relationship is with Xilinx. We'll call that 'trickle on' economics. I contacted you and recieved pricing almost a year ago. Was ready to jump on 50+ boards and you wanted $10K+ a piece
. I've negotiated rates lower than the cost of the VCU1525 and the MOQs aren't that high to go sub 4K. Please don't be disingenuous in an attempt to increase your bottom line. The only people who are paying more than the VCU1525 for chips are those with tiny MOQs (1-100). The lowest anyone paid for these chips is Amazon and Tencent. If I know what they paid, I'm sure you know what they paid. Which means, We both know the retail price of these boards should be around $3,000 with $4000 on the high end.
I was happy as a bouncing bean the day Intel bought Altera. They will finally open up the FPGA market to it's full potential. Do you have any idea how much better the
ENTIRE PLANET would be if you stopped these manipulative tactics and started to push the product? Do you understand that data processing servers could be taken offline down to a fraction of their current number by using FPGA as a coprocessing card for the applications of that server? That the carbon footprint of ALL DATACENTERS COMBINED could be dropped to a mere fraction of what is is currently? I've got about 20KW of hardware sitting in racks right now processing apache, mysql, php, etc, things that could be processed in 1/10th the time at 1/10th the power on a FPGA. Who wouldn't want to get rid of 20 web servers operating at 300 watts each in favor of 2 300W servers with 1 100W fpga card each?! Intel can see what clearly Xilinx has been unable to see. And, we won't have to deal with a bunch of anti-competitive, anti-trust corporate thugs. But hey, why sell 10,000,000 pieces at $1,000 each ($50 prod cost) to improve the planet when you could manipulate the market and sell 1,000,000 for $10,000 each ($50 prod cost) to improve your annual bonus?
It burns me up seeing one of the most powerful computing devices ever conceived of being used as a glorified network card.
You'd be really surprised at how many products you'd move if you offered a few firmwares to accelerate sql / web / java application processing. Maybe then you can get your MOQ up to what amazon's was/is and become the supplier of a $3,000 co-processing card. Example:
https://swarm64.com/how-it-works/I don't know if I would exactly depend on Intel as the savior. There are probably thousands of products listed on their ARK page that are impossible for a consumer to get. Anything that they come out with that has great performance and a reasonable oem price seems to be exclusively sold by Supermicro at wildly inflated prices.
