Topic: GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion - page 100. (Read 146665 times)

Just to chime in, your stance about this is getting you +1s everywhere

Really, Bitmain, you're rocking the shit out of every other manufacturer.

I'd like to go ahead and say thanks to bitmain for their support of this project; between Janet, Yoshi, and Bitmain Warranty, we've had three separate people from bitmain making sure that we had the info we needed on chip availability/prices.   It's pretty encouraging to see that kind of support for this project.

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novak

I've been talking to your people for a couple weeks and that's literally the first time anything NDA has been mentioned. I'll get back to him about that I reckon.

you may want to reach out to Yoshi and get the NDA signed for further pricing on more quantity and availability info

Righto. The price Janet gave me on 1000 was actually about 20% lower than what Yoshi said, which I'm certainly not going to complain about. What would pricing and availability be like for 10,000 chips? We're trying to figure out a good timeline for things. We're sending off for prototype breakout boards today, and later this week I'll be working on a stick miner design which we'll modify as necessary once we have breakout boards in hand to test chip functions. 1000 chips would be okay for a stick miner batch, but as the primary goal is a larger (18-chip) board which hopefully would be designed and prototyped within a few weeks after the breakout boards are here, it'd be nice to know if we could get a large batch of chips to run out a large batch of full boards within the next month or two.

If you need to message me and keep some of the numbers out of the public eye that's fine. I'd just like to get an idea of what's possible.

Sidehack,

Yoshi got your message about your specific order quantity and got you going with the order process moving with Janet with even a special discount on a smaller chip count. (The price you listed here is lower than what is on the price sheet   )

if you need 25wafers, they can be shipped in 2 business days after the payment, however, price be different from in-stock shipping vs 2-month lead time version.  Wafer has to be ordered then they have to be packaged and it takes time.

And the new chips for the summer will be a fantastic one, but please wait for the official announcement regarding those items.

Janet told me that 1000 chips could ship from stock, but that in general all chips were set aside for miners under construction already. Yoshi did not say anything about wafer orders, just also that 1000 chips could ship from stock and to contact Janet for purchasing.

Every time I've asked for protocol details I was told to just look at the code for the U3 and such. Everything appears to be standard UART comms so it's probably all implemented in cgminer drivers anyway. I think the only real tricks would be fan speed and temp sensor interfacing, and core voltage adjustment. But code is Novak's job, so I can't really say anything for sure.

What's the MOQ to get proper documentation on the interface protocol?

as of now, 25 wafer can ship as in-stock without the 2-month lead time.  May be something was lost in the translation. 

just to clarify 

Might be worth looking into, but when I saw their tapeout announcement I wondered how likely it was they'd have chips in April, let alone a deliverable product. Also, we don't really care about scrypt at all.

Although this isn't a proven chip, apparently SFARDS (which used to be Gridseed) is launching a new miner that could be interesting.  They state they are planning to launch their miner in April, and chip specs sound promising.  Not sure if you saw this thread:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-sfardssf100-the-first-28nm-dual-mode-miner-is-accepting-pre-order-now-985400

I need to check on my hom desktop for the Price of A3222 I will pm you as soon as I have it. (around 5$ if my memory is good)
Its not awesome but I guess maybe we could get a better price if we buy bigger quantity. Janet also told me the same about MOQ.

We could check that via PM or skype.

What were you told for Avalon pricing? I might be interested in their next chip in a few months, but the pricing versus performance on the 3222 isn't really gonna cut it. By the time we'd have miner to market the chip would be almost a year old and 1.5 generations behind.
I'm looking at getting a thousand of BM1384 at the start, and was told [redacted out of courtesy for Bitmain]. Bulk availability I'm told MOQ of 25 wafers, minimum two month lead time, wasn't given a price.

I have no problem teaming up on discounted chips, especially if the end result is home miners get two more decent machines on the market and the net cost to them is reduced.

Hey Sidehack

Me and VS3 are also looking to make a home miner. 

Maybe we could consider buying chip together to get better price.

I already have price for Avalon A3222 and currently talking with Janet for Bitmain chip.

Let me know! 

Then made sticks with the samples you have, and sell it, if the tester are happy you can made more, but first we need your result test, at least you can wait for the new chips, or build stick until new chips landing. (I prefer the second option, but is IMHO, and doesn't my money).

Sorry with my very bad English

The cost per unit will be as low as we can make it. Sure we like having money, but we also like taking care of customers and home miners have spent too long getting shafted.

USB sticks are definitely a go. The question is whether we want to try to move on a TypeZero with BM1384, or wait the extra months for a BM1386(?) board instead. We'll probably be redesigning for the newer chip anyway, as soon as we're able. But will it be worth the time and investment to continue a 1384 design, at least for a single batch. I guess that's something we'll need to figure out over the next month or so that we're prototyping.

Then you can make some USB sticks, and make some return for the near future, I'm interested in the miners, but the questios is the cost of the unit.

No they haven't. All I've been told is [something something new chip in the future sometime maybe, redacted out of courtesy to Bitmain]. I would bet the comms are pretty similar to the BM1384, which was identical to the BM1382 as far as I can tell, but the pinouts and packages haven't yet been the same from one chip to the next so I don't expect them to do it again. Hopefully it wouldn't take long to adapt a functional BM1384 board to a BM1386 (or whatever) board if they don't change their IO protocols and voltages,  basically just redrawing footprints and rerouting some lines.

Have they given any indication that the new chip will have the same package and pinout as the existing chip?

So, looks like we'll be able to at least get a short run of about 1000 chips from Bitmain. The price is higher than I was hoping but still in the neighborhood of "reasonable" for a stick miner - which most of them will go on. We'll keep some for building probably ten TypeZero boards so we can send them out to some reputable tester/reviewers, and then have about 800 chips to put between one- and two-chip USB sticks. I've looked back over and verified all the breakout board PCB, so hopefully we'll be ordering a prototype batch of them today and have them in hand probably end of next week. Between now and then I'll run out a tentative stickminer PCB and get dimensions to heatsink people. Once the breakouts are populated and tested, we can finalize our stickminer design (having had a chance to find any problems with how we understand things to work) and get some test PCBs of them, and then finalize the TypeZero board and get test PCBs of it as well. We're probably looking at having stickminer prototypes in 3 weeks would be nice, but 4 is more likely.

So, question. If it's going to be about 5 weeks before we have a prototype TypeZero board, even if we ordered a bulk run of chips at that time (with 2 month leadtime before delivery) it'd be about 3.5 months before we had chips and boards in hand to start building. That puts us right around the time Bitmain will be announcing the next better chip. Would anyone buy the TypeZero Spec 1 board with BM1384 chips, or would we end up sitting on them and going broke? As soon as information is available for the new chip we can start designing for it instead, but we wouldn't have access to samples and prototype PCBs until later and it'd shift product availability back to maybe September instead of July.