Topic: Have large Xilinx devices? Turn them into money. (Read 1639 times)

I've been getting inquiries about running the TML (Tricone Mining Logic, see here) on other Xilinx devices besides the Spartan-6.

The short story is that it can be ported with a reasonable amount of effort to any Xilinx device from the Virtex-II Pro family or later, as long as the chip is big enough.  Usually the largest two or three devices in a family are "big enough", but it varies.  Note that Virtex-II came before Virtex-II Pro, and porting to Virtex-II isn't worth it (none of them were ever big enough to be useful).  I am currently running the TML on Virtex-II Pros.  Your board just needs to have the chip and a JTAG connection; nothing else is required.  It's incredibly rare to have a Xilinx chip on a board without a JTAG connection; even boards that use a Xilinx chip for some other purpose (like video transcoding boards) will still have the Xilinx JTAG header accessible.

Payment is by commission; a certain percentage of your hashpower is spent on my jobs rather than yours.  This is how I get paid for my work.  Since there's extra porting effort involved and nobody else has produced a high-performance miner for non-Spartan-6 devices, the commission rate for other chips is significantly higher than for Spartan-6.  How high basically depends on how much effort it's going to take me versus how many of your boards that effort will be spread across.  The more (identical) boards you have, the better.  If you have a large (50 or more) number of chips I can arrange a significantly lower commission.  If you have 20GH/s or more worth of chips I might be able to manage them for you; I would need SSH access to a linux box with JTAG connections to all of the chips.

Please contact me via email (in my profile).  Please don't send me forum PMs.

The forum doesn't have per-thread RSS support so I have no way of being notified when people post in this thread (I don't want email spam) and I don't check it regularly, so please don't be offended if I don't reply to replies here.

I'm also interested in purchasing old Xilinx chips if they're sufficiently cheap.  Usually only used ones or those to be recovered off of PCBs; if they're brand new and never-used you can get a fortune for them on eBay and I'm not interested in competing with that.  I'm also not interested in buying small quantities; usually it has to be at least 30-40 large chips to be worth the time it takes me to run a new PCB.  I suggest checking eBay's completed listings to get an idea of what the pricing ought to be; a lot of times peoples' expectations are way out of line.

Thanks!