This sounds cool. I'm an EE and I took an FPGA class in the past, and I've printed custom circuit boards. For a small batch of circuit boards, the cost is about $80. That would be enough for at least 3 circuits, maybe more (depending on how big they are).
If somebody helps me with FPGA choice and programming, I could *probably make custom boards, cheap. I think this is a good business opportunity.
If anybody wants to work on this over the summer, PM me. I have about 2 months of free time... just enough to get something done, I think.
Topic: FPGA mining (Read 24969 times)
Have you thought about some kind of hybrid GPU / FPGA solution?
e.g. http://www.siliconwolves.net/frames/projects.html
e.g. http://www.siliconwolves.net/frames/projects.html
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If they draw much less power per MH/s
The 80Mhash/s design draws less than 5 Watts. With a micro and Ethernet that might be a tiny bit more, but not much. The power regulator will also take it's share. So, I dunno, let's call it 10 Watts. They will basically always be profitable. It just might take a year to pay them off first.
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If they are easy to cool, it might be much easier to stack them/have more of them at once.
The 80Mhash/s design requires cooling from a small fan. I use a small 5 Watt fan and it does the job. You could probably get smaller, or even just use a passive heatsink.Down clocked to 50Mhash/s and it doesn't even need cooling at all. You could easily stack them, with one micro controller driving several FPGAs.
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I'm also wondering if 80 Mhash is the max performance you can squeeze out of it?
80 Mhash/s is the best I've gotten so far. My next goal is 160 Mhash/s inside a slightly larger FPGA. I'm by no means a guru here. Someone with more experience than I could easily redo the adder chains and possibly redo the register spacing to pull maybe 120 Mhash/s out of the chips I quoted above. 
The big question would be power draw + coolability then...
If they are easy to cool, it might be much easier to stack them/have more of them at once.
If they draw much less power per MH/s, in the longer run it might pay off against a graphics card (longer run = maybe years!)
If they are easy to cool, it might be much easier to stack them/have more of them at once.
If they draw much less power per MH/s, in the longer run it might pay off against a graphics card (longer run = maybe years!)
Definitely not cheap. It is as you say, the cost per Mhash rate is definitely not worth it.
I'm also wondering if 80 Mhash is the max performance you can squeeze out of it?
I'm also wondering if 80 Mhash is the max performance you can squeeze out of it?
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How steep are these costs? Toss around some $ figures.
Using what I've developed to-date, these would be the costs (USD):DIY Kit - 80MH/s, computer required
* Altera DE2-115 Development Board - $600
Total: $600
Fairly soon I hope to have the LaunchPad micros up and running. So that'd be:
Future DIY Kit - 80MH/s, runs independently (no computer)
* Altera DE2-115 Development Board - $600
* LaunchPad eval kit - $4
* Ethernet module - $25
Total: $629
Supposing a custom board was made:
Possible Custom FPGA Board - 80MH/s, runs independently (no computer)
* Altera Cyclone 4 C115 chip - $400
* Custom PCB & parts - $20 - $50?
* Micro - $4?
* Ethernet - $15?
Total: $469
Anything with a question mark is an educated guess. And of course a custom board has design costs associated with it, which would have to be folded into any quantity of units sold.
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So anyone selling an FPGA miner box yet?
Sure, if you can afford the steep cost of FPGAs.I haven't much thought about an actual product, since I doubt anyone would buy it at the mhash/$ rate FPGAs get.
Depends. How steep are these costs? Toss around some $ figures.
Huzzah! I got my LaunchPad microcontroller kits today. $4 USD each, shipped. 
Too bad TI's development tools have terrible licenses. Only free one is code-size limited 
I'll be putting them to use as controllers for the FPGAs; communicating with a pool over ethernet and providing a remote interface. This will make the FPGAs completely independent, and far more stable than a GPU miner
Only thing I'm missing are ethernet controllers. I'm looking at WIZnet W5100 breakout, but will have to wait until I've mined enough bitcoins to buy them
P.S. Yes, I know the Altera C120 dev kit has an on-board ethernet controller. And no, I don't want to lose all my hair fighting SOPC system builder to get it working.
Too bad TI's development tools have terrible licenses. Only free one is code-size limited I'll be putting them to use as controllers for the FPGAs; communicating with a pool over ethernet and providing a remote interface. This will make the FPGAs completely independent, and far more stable than a GPU miner
Only thing I'm missing are ethernet controllers. I'm looking at WIZnet W5100 breakout, but will have to wait until I've mined enough bitcoins to buy them
P.S. Yes, I know the Altera C120 dev kit has an on-board ethernet controller. And no, I don't want to lose all my hair fighting SOPC system builder to get it working.
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So anyone selling an FPGA miner box yet?
Sure, if you can afford the steep cost of FPGAs.I haven't much thought about an actual product, since I doubt anyone would buy it at the mhash/$ rate FPGAs get.
So anyone selling an FPGA miner box yet? 
6950 level cards will drop to around $100.
That's fairly unlikely. 5850 came out 1.5 years ago. Except for the somewhat peculiar Sapphire 5850 Xtreme, the price never fell much below $200.Something like.. major online shop like newegg or tigerdirect to have a card readily available (not just a fluke sale) that can hash at 240mh/s for $100 by 10/1/2012
When I say 6950 level I mean a card that can hash at a similar level, I do not mean the exact card. They may come out with a new line lets say the 7000 series with a model that fits in at that hashing performance. I do think in 1.5 years it could happen.
6950 level cards will drop to around $100.
That's fairly unlikely. 5850 came out 1.5 years ago. Except for the somewhat peculiar Sapphire 5850 Xtreme, the price never fell much below $200. 
Above site is very cool for getting started. Agree with other sentiments that a GPU with always outperform an FGPA for mining but there are a lot of other cool / useful projects for FPGAs. Digilent has some good cheap hardware dev kits, I bought one just to have a play around with a few years ago for a hundred bucks or so.
I haven't got around to trying it yet but there are a few open source projects for things like complete hardware replicas of Space Invaders floating about that boot the original ROMs. However I have used them on a few fairly simple but useful things like multiple quadrature counters to offload things from small micros. OpenCores is also worth a look, but only once you get the hang of the basics.
I haven't got around to trying it yet but there are a few open source projects for things like complete hardware replicas of Space Invaders floating about that boot the original ROMs. However I have used them on a few fairly simple but useful things like multiple quadrature counters to offload things from small micros. OpenCores is also worth a look, but only once you get the hang of the basics.
www.fpga4fun.com
You can build simple designs and test them in a free copy of ModelSim without owning a real FPGA. Small FPGAs dev kits are very cheap these days. There's a Cyclone 4 kit out there for $80 USD ($60 for academic).
You can build simple designs and test them in a free copy of ModelSim without owning a real FPGA. Small FPGAs dev kits are very cheap these days. There's a Cyclone 4 kit out there for $80 USD ($60 for academic).
Thanks, this is exactly the kind of site I was looking for.
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Suppose I have a couple of hundred Euros to spend, and I want to learn about FPGAs in general
www.fpga4fun.comYou can build simple designs and test them in a free copy of ModelSim without owning a real FPGA. Small FPGAs dev kits are very cheap these days. There's a Cyclone 4 kit out there for $80 USD ($60 for academic).
Suppose I have a couple of hundred Euros to spend, and I want to learn about FPGAs in general (Bitcoin is just a nice excuse). Where should I begin? I have a range of experience in electronics and programming, and I use Linux, which may limit the choice of hardware/software somewhat.
I think this is a dead end. Yes, FPGA's are more power efficient but for bitcoin mining you need BOTH power efficiency and cost efficiency. If you need to pay 10x per mega hash per second the guy with the GPU is going to have a payback way before you are. GPU's are also a moving target as well, the price of 6990 will decline and within a year or so a new faster card will take it's place. 6950 level cards will drop to around $100.
Suppose I have a couple of hundred Euros to spend, and I want to learn about FPGAs in general (Bitcoin is just a nice excuse). Where should I begin? I have a range of experience in electronics and programming, and I use Linux, which may limit the choice of hardware/software somewhat.
Wow, FPGA miners seem to be pretty popular at the moment! I'm also working on an Bitcoin+FPGA project for school, although our project is more security-oriented -- we're setting up a (very small) test network, which we'll pit a malicious FPGA-equipped client against and measure how many hash/sec are necessary to fork the chain successfully. Basically we're trying to get some empirical data to test the calculations in Satoshi's paper.
We're using FPGAs instead of GPUs because a group we're working with is also interested in creating FPGA coprocessors for PCs/microcontrollers, and Bitcoin mining seems like a natural application (similar to Alexium's project). We're still writing the code for the FPGAs though, so mskwik, I'd also be interested in seeing your code.
We're using FPGAs instead of GPUs because a group we're working with is also interested in creating FPGA coprocessors for PCs/microcontrollers, and Bitcoin mining seems like a natural application (similar to Alexium's project). We're still writing the code for the FPGAs though, so mskwik, I'd also be interested in seeing your code.
just be warned I don't really comment anything when writing code for myself.
Understood. Thank you very much, PM sent.
It was a 1200 of the faster variety, not sure the package off the top of my head, will have to look at the project file later. Don't have the dev board around anymore, it wasn't actually mine I was just borrowing it. I can make a copy of the basic code files for you to experiment with, send me an email via PM and I'll pull together at least the basic test project VHDL files later today, just be warned I don't really comment anything when writing code for myself.
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