Topic: EasyMiner - new version with Auto speed tuning - page 2. (Read 22829 times)

Hi guys, I thought I'd take the opportunity to clarify where EasyMiner fits into our plans.  

EasyMiner is not meant to supplant or compete with existing miners.  It's development followed the need for user friendly firmware upgrades & performance evaluation of Butterfly Labs hardware.  Outside mining on a live pool (any pool) is a secondary function scheduled for upcoming release.  As a miner, it's primary purpose is to provide easy mining for people not familiar with a Linux terminal command environment.  Professional miners who've built systems depending on CGminer and the like will surely want to continue using those mature & feature rich platforms.  We'll continue to encourage software miner developers in their support of our hardware by giving their dev teams early hardware access and by promoting their software platforms to our customers.

As a side note, I think there's been some drama between BFGminer and CGminer software leads (Luke-Jr & Con) with regards to who is ahead of the pack in post GPU mining software support.  Some favoritism seems to have been attributed to us in this drama, so maybe it's worth clearing the air on that issue while we're on the topic.  Both are excellent developers (no kidding, they're Ace + coders).  Along the way, we've had an open door policy for any software developer who would like to log in and test their code live while using any of our hardware platforms.  Ufasoft, Bitminter, BFGminer and CGminer dev teams have all participated in this program.  We've probably had the longest working relationship with Luke-Jr as he was also one of our earliest customers and showed steel nerves by pre-ordering with Bitcoin while most of the forum community was busy convincing themselves we didn't exist.  He was also enormously helpful in adding the initial support for our products to CGminer.  Although we've enjoyed Luke's collaboration we've not been aware of any of the miner software politics that have led some to think we're pushing Luke over anyone else.  Until recently, he's simply been the only guy from the CGminer camp who showed up at all, and we thank him for that.  

So once again...  to clear the air, I'd like to repeat that we have an open door policy and welcome any developer.  You'll always have special and early access to the hardware.  All you have to do is ask.  

If you load it up, you will see that it has a mining function, but that has been disabled. This is because it is not fully developed, but the firmware updates were needed so it was released with mining functionality disabled. Even if it were enabled, you would be stuck with EMC as the pool.

is easyminer ever intended to mine if not the name is kind of ironic. ?

Most people use EasyMiner to update the firmware of their Single, and then use CGMiner to mine.

Sorry for my ignorance - Just to verify  - you cannot actually mine with easyminer? That seems strange

CGMiner is the probably the best miner software out there. And last I knew, mining in EasyMiner was not actually enabled.

I see a lot of people using CGminer - Why would one want to use CGminer instead of easy miner? is there a trend or preference emerging for one over the other.

Thanks

David

It goes over 900 during testing.

896 is the fastest firmware released to date.

Has anyone got above 896? I'm still at 38c but it always chooses 896..

For mine, it settled on the maximum speed, but later started throttling. However dropping it down one notch manually fixed that, but it probably would have been fine if my room wasn't so dang hot. It's been cooking lately because the A/C isn't keeping up too well.

You need to let it run to completion.  Auto tune will announce when it's done it's work and list the end speed for each individual unit.  Please note that time to test will vary from unit to unit.

Looks cool. :-)

Yeah...   

Hehe, I saw that post you deleted BFL. I laughed!

The ztex doesn't require loading a new firmware - the firmware allows you to tell it what speed to run at on the fly.
i.e. the actual code in cgminer adjusts the MHz up or down as required during mining on the ztex.

I'm not sure why that is a difficult option, but I guess that is just the ztex guys know what they are doing and how to do it ...

Yes getting one answer of how fast to run will not last for weeks or months - you'd have to regularly stop it and run speed tests to determine the optimal speed ... though I'd even suggest the obvious that between midday and midnight there would be a difference

I run my BFL on the standard 832 bitstream for a few reasons:
1) I don't have windows anywhere near that mining rig (and BFL wont tell us how to program it or provide linux softwre)
2) The temperature drop at the moment is below 10C at night since it is now winter here and during the day it varies quite a bit - but certainly always below necessary temperatures. I'm sure that it could run faster at night but I'm seriously not gonna setup windows on my main mining rig or have to reboot it regularly just to change the bitstream for day and night time - that would be immensely annoying

@BFL: This new, nice feature is making the process to find the unit-specific, proper clockrate more easy, thanks for it even if I don't need it.
It shows the same results, you would get by testing the different images manually.
However, in the end it shows me that my units are able to run the fastest available image without any problems, what I know from my own test already.

So when will faster images be released? BFL-Engineer announced them over one Month ago. I guess there is no need for them anymore in the ASIC era...
Also the 792 Image is corrupt and is still not fixed.

As you already stated the environment temperature is very relevant to the max clockrate you can use.
My units are in a room without A/C and are seeing over the year environment temperatures from ~17°C-33°C.
So to measure the proper clockrate only once, doesn't make so much sense. If you don't want to care about your units anymore you have to test it with the max. environment temperate and loose a lot of the possible hashing power over the year.
It would be much better if the mining software (e.g. cgminer) has the Auto speed tuning feature included for BFL singles.
Which means it will always load the most perfect image into the device and keep checking it.
Or even better, if the unit (firmware) is adapting itself to the new environment (like e.g. ztex).

It tests and loads.

Is this simply a modified bitstream that is able to be told the clock frequency, or does it test the device and then load the appropriate bitstream?

Note to mini rig owners...  EasyMiner auto-tune works on the cards in the rigs as well.  They aren't as heat sensitive, but we don't ship them fully optimized and you may find increased performance with tuning.