Topic: GekkoScience BM1384 Project Development Discussion - page 18. (Read 146713 times)

It is not. It's an illustration of the principle involved. The guy that sells you Bud, for profit, has every incentive to sell you more, and to do so everywhere and every time. He has to compete with all the other beer sellers on quality and cost, thus driving quality up and prices down. Pure benefit to consumer, and beer makers slaughter each other to give you the best product.

Everyone needs bread. Should the gov't create a bread monopoly such that the extremely poor would always have some protection against the eeeevil food companies that won't give a little bit of bread away free? I mean, we do that with power. Let's just pass a law creating a Department of Bread, then ban Allinson, Alvarado Street Bakery, Arnold, Ball Park, Beefsteak, Bimbo, Brownberry, EarthGrains, Entenmann's, Eureka! Baking Company, Francisco, Freihofer's, J.J. Nissen, Mrs. Baird's, Old Country, Oroweat, Sara Lee, Stroehmann's, Thomas', Tía Rosa, Weber's, Bost's Bread, Breddy, Dave's Killer Bread, Davidovich Bagels, Flowers Foods, Holsum Bread, King's Hawaiian, Lender's Bagels, Merita Breads, Mother's Pride, Nature's Pride, Pan Desuyo, Pepperidge Farm, Polarbröd, Rudi's Organic Bakery, Schwebel's Bakery, Sunbeam Bread, VitBe and Wonder Bread, and all the tens of thousands of other bakeries out there from selling anyone bread that wasn't provided by Federal Bread and Water Co. Think that's a smart plan? I mean everyone needs bread. It's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity. Let's make goddamn sure those bread companies won't shut down people's bread supply after six months of not being paid for their bread.

There are any number of entities that are capable of selling you power right now, with no, or minor, changes to the last mile. Most, if not all, are forbidden by law from doing so or are bound by thousands of pages of regulation such that it isn't worth the effort.

Why *anyone* thinks that limiting to one the number of people that can provide you power somehow *helps* anyone or drives costs down and quality up is beyond me. It doesn't happen.

Come now, nobody needs beer. Complaining about a shortage of luxury items as a comparison to a shortage of utilities seems kinda foolish.

For the record, my town is home to the biggest St Pats festival in the state and I don't drink but am frequently cynical.

Also our utility provider is something of a member-owned rural cooperative, so presumably not evil. It also appears to be not evil by merit of my non-industrial rates being pretty low compared to a lot of other folks, that low rate being flat regardless of time of day or year, my bills being thorough and accurate, and stuff like if we wanted to upgrade service at the shop they'd pay for the transformers and installation and my rates would go down if we used more power and at the end of the year they credit surplus funds back to customers. It's kinda nice. I don't know why so many people look down on Missouri. Which is also home to Anheuser-Busch, whoopty-doo.

Speaking of monopolies dominating markets, anyone know if anyone's going to bring Bitmain some competition anytime soon?

Meh. Ever try to build your own car by buying the parts individually?

Generally, there is far more profit in a part than in a whole that comprises parts.

Certainly I cannot speak for Bitmain, but GM doesn't tell you that you cannot get new fuel injectors for their newest model the day it goes on sale because they need those fuel injectors to build more cars.

Ah yes. True monopoly pricing. "We can't have monopolies because they'll be able to charge whatever they want!!!"

"Well, except for true monopolies created by force of law! They'll be able to charge whatever they want!!"

Brilliant.

Energy has been democratized. Too bad you don't have 50 providers to choose from. I wonder why...

Happy?

It is a direct result of a true monopoly. The only monopolies that have ever existed: those created by force of law and defended by physical threat.

A heat wave is coming. Ever hear Budweiser (or Budvar, if you're an originalist) take to the ether and beg you all to cut down on buying Bud because the company can't keep up, and it's the right thing to do, and then "ask" you to accept rationing? Then, just when you need your ice cold Bud most, they take it away from you? Ever wonder why true monopolies do that? Ever wonder why true monopoly prices do just keep going up, *in spite* of regulation?

And people BEGGED for them. Still do.

Happy?

I wouldn't advise buying more than a few dozen of any chip without first playing with samples, whether they be engineering samples or final-version or whatever. Even if a design needs to be changed to accomodate the final product, having samples that are at least in the ballpark gets you in the ballpark and gets you there a heck of a lot sooner than waiting for production chips.

We left our conversations with Innosilicon at "when you get productions chips we'll buy them in quantity".
To be honest, I'm not the slightest bit interested in buying experimental prototypes which will likely differ considerably from production units.
And having been badly burned in pre-sales schemes before, the statement "not only NO, but F#$% NO" comes to mind.

Acquiring experimental prototype chips (assuming they'd sell them) and forwarding them to GS for board design seems like a huge waste of their time (and a waste of our money).
Given the high probability that the specs on the production chip will be radically different as a result of prototyping.

Put bluntly, if we were going to buy a large quantity of chips (250K-500K) we'd fund the design effort to make one of our own.
This concept is not "off the table".

We have little to no interest in the SFARDS chip, for a plethora of reasons already stated in this thread.

Bit Innosilicon isn't willing to sell sample chips. Right now they're looking for large batch investments, which sure as heck isn't gonna happen without playing with a few first to make sure they work right. If PC hasn't heard fresh news from Innosilicon, I have to assume that's still their stance.

I can understand that.   Bitmain I still hope they decide to help this project and be more willing to sell chips for project.

Good news is Innosilicon chances are will sell chips to anyone.  First batches most likely will go to LKetc though. But even if Bitmain does not sell again for a while there hopefully will be Innosilicon in not horribly distant future.

If PC gets SFARDS chips PC won't get GekkoScience boards. I've said it a dozen or two times already, but big BGA is stupid and hard to work with.

Have you tried to contact SFards?   I think a small version would be nice their 1.2k machine is a little price (although still can not buy direct).  

Maybe one or eve a few of these chips would be fun to play around i with the dual miner aspect.

To be honest there are so many ways for Bitmain to make money before they sell chips. If anything I am surprised that BM1384 chips were released, but I guess they were just running down stocks ahead of the BM1385 / S7 release?

I would love to see GekkoScience be able to buy some and come up with an S1/S3 sized solution as it's my only chance of having a BM1385 based product. S7 is just way too expensive with UK import duties & VAT etc. So good luck but IMHO unlikely until BM1386 is close to release.

Rich

Negative.

And it would be interesting to see work get done on a gh/$ effective "cpu pod" or more so PCB to be mounted on S1 heatsinks or such, but i'm guessing Bitmain is calling dibs on selling their(BM1385) chips for now until competition arise.

Right now they kind of have monopoly at that range.

While it would probably be super easy to modify the Compac to BM1385 (probably just change footprints, possibly voltage range) I'd just as soon not mess with it unless there's a lot of demand. And, from a business standpoint, I'd rather not put that out until the existing Compacs are all sold or I'd have a couple grand in chips and PCBs with nowhere to go.

The first (and probably smallest) product I'd put out with new chips (if I had enough) would be the pod miner intended to use a CPU cooler.

I'm not surprised BM isn't selling chips either. I didn't figure they'd let any sample chips go until at least after the S7 was shipping. I'm surprised they're not even responding, though. Usually they'd at least say something.

The info at Western Digital is spotty at best for now. It looks like the power supply they ship is only 5v. If you look at the pictures on their website, you can see the Pi logo on the drive it's self but you can't make out the specs on the power supply. I think they are integrating a simple SATA to USB 2.0 chip on the drive control card and using the USB 3.0 connector to provide an additional lane of 5v power to the drive. The trick part that I wanted to point out was the cable and the fact that they were using the USB 3.0 jack in an unconventional way, while still communicating assumedly in USB 2.0 protocol.

Yeah I just used the usb stick analogy as a comparison ..but wow 8gh to about 30gh is more then I figured)

Would be nice to see an 'open source' miner project (even if not ROI per say but then again modding cars or PC systems never paid either)

well xcel where i'm at it is 8.6c kwh they say..when you figure in taxes and other fees it is (as of last bill) 13.7c kwh exactly for what they state on the bill I used
just take that into consideration as well...Also the rate is the same all year long as far as I know.

Reality Sucks