Topic: HashFast announces specs for new ASIC: 400GH/s - page 547. (Read 880461 times)

I would prefer to get response from HashFast but thank You Beastlymac for quick answer.
I was trying to find any info about HashFast NDA agreement originating from HF but cant. Do You suggest that they sign NDA for a whole chain operations? Its ridiculous to me.

Do they act only as an chip designers and whole logistics is handled by mysterious contractor? This brings more and more questions.

If anyone here cares about being sure Hashfast claims are base on truth - please support me.

Hashfast - please find a minute or two to answer me.

They have already said they signed a NDA and can't disclose information like that. Also to do with water cooling you can get better temps meaning the chip can hash faster isn't that what everyone wants?

Chip wattage vs system wattage.  Remember you have two voltage conversions plus control boards, and other gear.  So the estimate is the entire system will use 350W however for the purpose of discussing the power and cooling of the chip it is only 250W.

Well design your own chip.    You didn't seriously think they were going to scrap a design and make another one because you don't like it do you.

Also you missed the point.  There is no fixed amount of surface area needed to cool X watts.   It is a curve.  The more surface area the less airflow you need all the way down to 0 CFM (passively cooled).   A radiator is generally much larger than an air cooled heatsink.  It is simple logistics.  Trying to mount a 12" x 6" heatsink directly to a chip is difficult (and dangerous as you could damage the die).  Using water to move the heat from the chip to a larger surface area is the whole point of water cooling.  Simply logistics mean you can't use as large of a heat sink directly air cool a chip, and thus need more airflow = more noise and more wattage.  Water cooling also has the advantage of lower delta T and cooler chips use less power. 

The company believes they have the expertise to design a large efficient processor.  If they can there is no reason to use a larger number of less powerful chips.  The less integration at the chip level the more integration that is needed at the board level.  More wafer cutting, more chip packaging, more complex boards, more supporting components, more fans, more heatsinks, more assembly, etc.  A larger number of smaller chips gives you more flexibility and makes cooling less of a challenge but the system isn't going to be cheaper or more importantly assembled faster.   Waterblocks are a significant portion of any water loop so if you are going to watercool less blocks is always better (i.e. water cooling two 5970s is going to be cheaper than 4x5870s).

There is more than one way to build a miner.  The nice thing about competition is you can pick the design you think provides the best chance of success.  I think it is great that you have different companies with different high level designs.  Bitfury uses almost 200 chips over 16 boards maybe you should look there?

Why HashFast ignore my questions (#561 and #674)?
I understand Your bold statements and support from much respectable forum members but this doesn't mean You don't need to respect other forum members.

Ill rephrase them again:

To have working device we need to:

1. Design a chip :                                  Work started: 2011 Status 2013: complete (?)
2. Tape-out :                                       20/08/2013: Dummy Tape-out
3. Produce Chip :                                     ??Whats You timeline here
4. Design PCB :                                       ??Whats You timeline here
5. Assembly service :                               ??Whats You timeline here
6. BOM - components preorder :                ??Whats You timeline here
7. Create software or adapt existing one :   ??Whats You timeline here
8. Design/Adapt Case :                             ??Whats You timeline here
9. Start shipping  :                               20-30 October

Do You still support initial claim about shipping dates or shipping date is just a wish we all want to come true?

I thought the Hashfast was 350watts, only 250watts when you under clock it? It's a bit hard to tell from the specs on their site.

...which is a problem created in the first place by the choice of concentrating 250W of heat on a single socket, requiring high airflow over a relatively small space.

If Hashfast had designed 4 x 63W chips as I suggested, there would be 4 heatsinks occupying a larger space, hence allowing the use of larger, slower, lower-wattage fans.

By the way, this is wrong. You need to consider the system as a whole when comparing water cooling vs air cooling.

You need at least N square centimeters of surface area to transfer 250W of heat to the air no matter the cooling solution: whether this surface area is the fins of a heatsink in an air cooling setup, or the radiator helping water exchange its heat with air in a water cooling setup. (And as you pointed out, water cooling in general uses even more surface area to allow using slower and larger fans.) Now what do you think require less material and parts:

(1) have the N square centimeters of metal sitting right on top of a chip, or
(2) have the chip transfer the heat through a water block, to water, through a pump, through a radiator.

Obviously (1), that is air cooling, requires less material and parts, and less assembly overall: the same N square centimeters of surface area is required (or less), but there is no water, no pump, no water block.

"This is still a question" because Vbs is here to spread FUD about HashFast.

He's on ACTM's Board of Cheerleaders, invested more than he can afford to lose, and got married to a competitor's  stock that not only became obsolete soon after launch but is also enduring disasters WRT BTC conversion and bulk Avalon orders.

At this point, asking dumb questions which have already been answered repeatedly is all he can do to prop up his failing stillborn venture.

With a large radiator you can use larger, slower, lower wattage fans.  Heat transfer to air is directly related to surface area.  A radiator is going to have much more surface area and thus need less airflow.   With a large enough radiator you could get by with no fans.  Another thing to consider is that the power consumption of an ASIC (any ASIC) rises with temperature.  Water cooling tends to have a lower delta T (difference in chip temp and ambient air temp).  

Nonsense, you still need to get the heat out of the water, that requires energy spent on fans and pumps, water is only more efficient if the pumps + fans use less power than air cooling fans.

Of course, there are plenty of vendors! If you opened up a BFL Single SC, you would find it has 2 standard 120mm fans + 2 standard CPU heatsink/fan assemblies. These are real commodity parts, available in much larger quantities than any water block.

Who buys watercooling gear from newegg?  Sounds like someone who has never watercooled anything.

Each of KNC chips is rated at 250W.  So either 250W can't be cooled with air (in which case KNC is screwed) or HF could just as easily cool their 250W chip with air.  So why choose water.  Simple water has 16x the thermal conductivity of air.  You can cool a large wattage device more effectively and quieter using water.

By "commodity" I assumed they meant "off the shelf".  Since it has the package size roughly that of a CPU it will work with any waterblock designed for a CPU.  Case, fans, radiator, power supply it is all commodity gear.   The only parts which are unique to HF are the ASIC boards and controller board.  Now compare that to BFL cooling and power solution.  Think there is even a single vendor selling an air or water cooler for a BFL single?

My hope is in their next batch they allow DIY kits.  Sell me three ASIC boards and a controller board and let me build my own (with flourinert).

Thanks for the link.

They explain they wanted to rely on commodity computer processor cooling parts. "Commodity" is air-cooling and heatsinks designed for CPUs up to 100-150W, at most. A heatsink or water cooling block designed to dissipate 250W of heat is hardly "commodity"...

Heck, check Newegg: there are 27 products in the "water cooling system" category vs 300 products in the "processor heatsink/fan" category. And Newegg restricts the purchase quantity of most water cooling systems to 5 per customer. Found a model you like, and want to buy units to keep as spares for your Hashfast farm? Can't even buy more than 5 from Newegg! Have to resort to sourcing from multiple resellers, shipping hassles, etc... I get the feeling that HashFast is out of touch with the reality of what is a "commodity" part in computer hardware.

Right, and they require cheaper fans and heatsinks as well.

Multicore chips need a huge amount of bandwidth between the cores.  Each core can actually read eachother's cache at full cache access speed. They need to do that to implement thread memory locks - as soon as one chip changes a spot in memory, all the other chips need to be able to see it. (Although this is different in some multicore cellphone chips to save energy)

bitcoin miners barely need any bandwidth at all.  If you split up the chip you could use water cooling on all of them and potentially pump more power through them and get more hashrate for the same amount of silicon.   You would have the same w/mm^2 of silicon, but each one could have more total heatsink area.

I assume they were just thread crapping... the ignore list just gets a bit longer.

How old are you people, 3?  What an embarrassing exchange.

Yes the energy density is the same. But my point remains: it is technically easier to cool 4 x 63W chips than 1 x 250W chip. So I am waiting for Simon's reply... If my point wasn't clear enough: an air-cooled 4 x 63W-chip Hashfast Baby Jet could almost assuredly be designed and shipped before a more complex water-cooled 1 x 250W-chip system.

PS #1: the reason Intel doesn't use 4 sockets on consumer grade boards is because sockets are expensive (4 sockets at $10 each would double the price of a consumer grade $40 mobo...) plus space is constrained in a desktop form factor (whereas nobody care really if a 400 Gh/s miner delivered in October is 1U vs 3U).

PS #2: I also disagree with BFL's choice of the PCIe form factor. I am just saying it could be worse if they had decided to host a single 300+ watt chip on the card.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/?category=Power+Supplies&manufacturer=&editorschoice=1&recommended=1&pp=25&order=score

Yeah PSU have gotten much better in the last decade.  Finally.  The "80Plus" program has actually done some good.  It sucked that at one time ATX PSU had a sweet spot of maybe 80% efficiency in a narrow band of 50% to 60% of peak power.  No reason that it took this long to finally get decent PSU.  Thank the rising wattage requirements and electrical rates.