Topic: HashFast announces specs for new ASIC: 400GH/s - page 545. (Read 880816 times)

OMG

Slow sales equates to a late tapeout. The fab run can take a while so you're looking at mid Nov to mid Dec. Delayed  

Another Delay.?

Ok well it is official then. No October delivery.

64 days from Monday is the end of October

We should be able to get our chip through the fab in 64 days, and we'll have another few days to create modules out of the chips.  They will then attach to the board via a socket.

Thanks for the update John 

It hasn't happened yet, but it is very close. I wish I could say more... but will soon.

 - John

I was thinking the same thing:

Any updates on the Tapeout?

Hey there!

1st week of december 2013 but it's not official yet, I commented because I just had a full day of meeting and discussions with our ASIC partner exactly on this subject and we came out clearly with the conclusion that big supercharged single chip miners end up being MORE (yes, more) expensive in total BOM than a rig of smaller, agile mining ASICs.



Yay let's not talk about Avalon's design anymore please, it was the world's first ASIC miner and was conceived with the idea of a central unit talking simultaneously to all the 24/32 hashing units, future miners based on small chips (like Bitfury) feature a ridiculously low cost serial bus that daisy chains them all together with no additional external components (except for some decoupling capacitors).
  

What 28nm ASIC?

I agree, these large hot chips seem nonsensical.

I totally agree with you on this.

This is why I wrote in a few threads that companies should be looking into paralleling their designs...NOW....not later.

Eventually, the price will have to drop too sharply for them to be able to sell it. If this happens before they ship, they will fold. Companies need to be looking at what their business model looks like 5 or 6 months from now. Otherwise there will be alot of companies with designs that don't work with that eventuality.

Hi Giorgio!

When is your expected timeline for your selfmade ASIC?

You dont have to be very specific. I just want to know: 2013? 2014? December? January?

No no I was talking about our future 28nm ASIC, not our current Avalon clones! It's obvious that you can't compare a first with a third generation mining device.

Well Avalon charges $9 per chip (AFAIK someone correct me if I am wrong) and that is obviously inflated 1000% or more over silicon cost and that cost will sink like a stone.  So you could remove $2400 from the system by assumming the price of chips in bulk drops from $9 to $1 to remain competitive.  However my point was that even doing that looking at an Avalon, the balance of the system cost (PCB, heatsinks, assembly, DC to DC power supply, power distribution board, controller board, even mundane things like fans, power supply, and cases) isn't being marked up 1000%.  Excluding the cost of the chips you couldn't drop the cost on the rest of the system 90%.   So while the value (and price) of older chips will indeed fall like a stone the BOM (balance of materials) cost will subdue the price drops.

On a related topic this is why I believe those that think $1/GH complete miners are reasonable are just silly.  Still in full disclosure I own miners, shares, and pre-orders with multiple companies but not Avalon so I may just be biased.

I updated the post.  The product in question is the one available from the person I was responding to.

B1 Delivered in March.

It is a good thing they are still way above cost, cause the worth of such machines will drop like a stone.

Product who has for order?  I only paid $1500 for my B2 Avalon - $18/Gh/s.  Delivered In June.

Only a few dollars more expensive per Gh/s then HashFast. Clearly they're not charging anywhere near their actual mfg cost.

I am comparing the product they have available for order.  If they have a bitfury based product I would have used that.

Still maybe I wasn't clear.  A 4 board avalon uses 300 chips correct?  They are currently excessively marked up ~$9 ea so lets pretend the price was dropped to ~$1 per chip.  That would remove $2400 from the cost of the system.  It is easy to see that either the seller has massive profit margin (I doubt it since given the Avalon uncertainty they would prefer to see out of pre-orders) or the BOM (balance of material) on that "huge number of low powered chips" contributes significantly to the overall costs.

Lets look at GPUs.  With crossfire (some software magic) 2 GPU can split workload.  A 7990 is essentially two downclocked 7970s internally crossfired.  AMD doesn't try to make a monster single chip 7990 because rightly so there is point where you get diminishing returns on larger and hotter chips.  However cross fire isn't limited to two chips.  Why not make a single chip of reasonable middle range computing power.  Then you could put one chip on a board and call it a 7950, two chips on a board and call it a 7970 and 4 chips on board and call it a 7990.  One inventory part, 3 products.  There was some research into that (and I am sure AMD/NVidia still are) but having a single unified chip reduces the post-fab assembly production/yeild issues.

All I am saying (now in an excessively verbose way) is there are pros and cons to each approach.

Take KNC for an example they use 4 chips on their top of the line model.  Aha! See even KNC is taking the "more less powerful chips aproach" leaving only HF taking the path less traveled.  Except not quite.  KNC chip uses roughly the same power as HF.  The need to use 4 chips is simply due to a less efficient architecture*. KNC isn't using 3, or 2, or 1 chips because at 250W they (and HF) are reaching the limit of what can be cooled realistically.


*Before the KNC warriors attack me this isn't an insult.  Just comparing reported specs.  It may be that KNC is overly cautious on power projections and HF is overly optimistic.  It may be that KNC decided they could make a more efficient chip but time to market was more important and 2.5W per GH was "sufficient".  Whatever the reason my point is that KNC needs 4 chips to acheive the same hashing power not because they are taking a "more and cooler" aproach but because that is where they maxed out at.  If they were 4x as efficient they would be using a 400 GH/s chip as well.

Cointerra:                                                $8/Gh
Butterfly Labs:                                         $8/Gh
XCrowd:                                                  ~$2/Gh

If we're comparing chips that don't exist, let's try to include all of them.