heated disscussion.
Those are pretty cool. Would love to know what the final price is going to be.
He gave us enough of a range on price to do some math with. Less than $648 and more than $550(since he stated $500 was a bit less than his costs).
I am still gonna stick to within 10% or so of my orig speculation once he crunches all the math on parts and labor costs involved. Unless he plans to order 500+ chips at once and contracts with an ultra cheap assembler in hopes you forum peoples will buy them before a cheaper design can be built.....
less than 600$, first batch.
That still puts X6500 more expensive. ;p Not tring to argue with ya, m8. But your orginal comment of it in comparison tot he x6500 is off a bit. Also, X6500 started out at 200. Icarus is in the same boat and has been stated as such by the developer that he is still working on optimizing the mining code.
Point is, from the range Ng has hinted to thus far, his mark-up will be much less than others and his end-user price per MH is better...
It won't be better (from a purely myopic $/MH basis) unless it's equal to or lower than the x6500 unless he undercuts the x6500 price. Which is kinda sad because it looks like a much nicer board (for reasons unrelated to $/MH).
Or would you like to take a bet that a board with the _lower_ speed grade version of the same part is going to deliver higher performance? I might take the opposite of that bet.
Icrus uses a -2I fpga, "I " means the industrial temperature. speed/voltage spec are guaranteed across the industrial temperature range. by my testing, -2I is very alike with -3C, and the price is also the same, bug much easier to buy in my country.
Icarus is in the same boat and has been stated as such by the developer that he is still working on optimizing the mining code.
Well not exactly the same boat. The theoretical performance for a LX150 is ~200MH/s.
Ztek is getting 190MH/s on 1x LX150 or 90% of peak.
Icarus is getting 360MH/s on 2x LX150 or 80% of peak.
X6500 is getting 250MH/s on 2x LX150 or 62.5% of peak.
So X6500 has the POTENTIAL to make larger increases in performance and thus larger changes in MH/$. Ztek is pretty much at peak performance. Looks like he is looking at changing the voltage that might pick up another ~4 or 5 MH but it is pretty optomized. Icarus could pick up some speed (and thus moderate reduction in MH/$) but not much.
Granted I wouldn't buy a board only on potential but the X6500 is interesting simply because it has a low cost per FPGA which potentially could delivery higher performance per $. Still they got their work cut out for them because all that really matters in the end if MH/$.
Point is, from the range Ng has hinted to thus far, his mark-up will be much less than others and his end-user price per MH is better...
Hinted but I would like to see a firm price list w/ volume pricing.
Of course if BF Labs 1GH/s for $500 isn't a scam well that pretty much kills all these projects.
I think a well designed PCB, enhanced on board power regulator, and high-quality assembling is also important for a long run. and that's why people do not buy the cheapest brands of GPUs / PSUs for mining.
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