It seems nobody answered my question regarding a board with higher amount of chips so i will ask again.
Whats the best performance in regards to how many chips are on a pcb? I believ avalon is putting 16 on a pcb, burnin thinks about 20 chips. But i wonder wouldnt it be more efficient to make a big pcb with maybe 100 or 200 chips on it? Only one step to implement many chips, probably one power supply and so on.
I mean i see how many chips some people order. And i see the prices for "one board". I dont believe that a chip with 1000 chips would be cheaper at all because of the size that would drive the production cost into heights. But where is the optimum here? Burnin says 10 chips for 80€ and 20 for 100€. So its cheaper to build in more chips. Wheres the possible optimum?
I really think the one that develops this "cheapest" board will make a fortune. And the one that creates the biggest board will be friend of those that bought a batch on its own and dont want to have staying around 1000 miners with 10 chips each. The more units the more costs, the more needed connections and so on.
With such an order you might be better off asking one of the DIY PCB designers to work with you specifically for a larger board that would be more efficient in terms of components and power compared to smaller offerings if it is even possible. Can't see why it wouldn't. Or find someone to develop a design for you. There are sites where you can hire designers for this
https://www.odesk.com/.
Sounds like an interesting idea. Maybe wait until end of May when avalon gives out the design and then the developer will have something to work on. I only wonder if i could judge from a design if it will work. I mean im no pro that can say this easily.
With my design it will be possible to panellize multiple 10x10cm boards onto bigger ones. But it doesn't get much more economical to do that and you lose some modularity. A 20cm x 20cm board is quite reasonable and that would hold 4 modules with no extra design effort - just plunk the gerber files down 4x. And you end up with 64 chips / board. Or 20x30 would give you 80 chips, which is nice as it's about the same size as a sheet of paper, so still easy to work with.
I should note if you panellize then you can leave off the usb connector except for one per big board. You would make an octopus PCIe power splitter joining one PSU lead to one big board, with 4 or 6 plugs. And a small 3 pin ribbon jumper to hop around the modules for I2C data.
Can you guess what size of pcb in general would have the best production price? I mean 20 pcb with one chip most probably will cost more than one pcb with 20 chips. But a pcb of 1m x 1m will cost much money too i guess. So what do you think is the optimum in between?
Is the power needed a costfactor too? For example a one-chip miner needs a power supply that has a certain price but 1000 chips on one pcb need a special super high priced power supply. Something like that. The rest, software, cases and so on most probably is secondary.
So what do you guess here?
You guys are dead on the money.
I am working my own design with 16X16 Avalon chips in a single board, using a PCI-ex4 interface, and the standard PCI-e 12V suplemental power as additional power source. If all the footprint is there (and much more powerfull) in an ATX motherboard, why bother building additional boards and interfaces as in the Avalon Design?
With 256 chips per board you can hash conservatively 64GHs/s per board. You can stack up to 5 of these boards together for over 320 Ghs/s per unit.
Worth to try...
Sounds nice. So you create one big board with 256 chips? How big would this pcb be? I guess you have a design where one broken chip doesnt take other down with it.
Only out of interest... if your design works would you sell it so that someone could create miners with it by making contracts with specialized companies?
(voltage transformers/resistors/capacitors)
