Looking at "eldentyrell" thread it looks like the MH/J goes down a bit when it's pushed. So the boards with fans it looks like it would to need up to 50A. Reading what he saying is that three Sparten6 at 245MH/s would use 39W so with the boards also powering fans maybe three Sparten'6 per board would be best unless the boards can operate at 58W instead of 45W at 800MH/s with the fans. 58W tho for 980MH/s is still good tho beating the BFL-Single on both hashrate and efficiency. Or with just three Sparten6 modules with fans per board/backplane on the new bitstream at 44W for 735MH/s saving $250 per board or a fourth board for every three you buy. Tho maths could be wrong and "eldentyrell" could change his figures.
"eldentyrell" is going to be selling this bitstream is this FPGA company thinking of licensing it?
First off the fans don't run off the power converter they tie directly to the 12v supply from the molex so we dont have to worry about the power used by those. Using the number he posted 18.4 MH/s per watt at 245 MH/s you would be using 13.31 watts per FPGA or 53.24 watts for the whole board another thing to note is he says this is for the whole board including power loss in the power converters these spartan 6 chips run off of 2 power supplies 1 3.3v and 1 1.25v(actually 3 but VCCAUX and VCCIO can be combined on the 3.3v) so to get the actual wattage used by the 1.25v power converter it would be 53.24 watts - power lost in converting 12v to 1.25v - power lost in converting 12v to 3.3v - power used by the 3.3v supply - power lost from copper trace resistance
I'm not sure what the end number would be but I know theres not very much power used from the 3.3v
A lot of power is lost in converting 12v to 1.25v I think most power converters will loose 10-20% power doing a 12v to 1.25v conversion at full load so lets just say 15% you come out with 45.9 watts then you still have to subtract the power used by the 3.3v supply I'll just take a wild guess and say 3 watts(may be more may be less idk?) 45.9 - 3 = 42.9watts used by the 1.25v supply
the power converter can output 40 Amps and actually more than that but its not recommended.
1.25v @ 40 Amps = 50 watts
when 42.9 are needed
These numbers really arn't accurate at all though just a rough estimate
Another thing eldentyrell stated:
I expect the power numbers to get slightly better when I switch from SRL16s to RAM32M's, but otherwise it's probably safe to assume that the current MH/J numbers are an upper bound on the final numbers. Note that the final MH/s is not yet known, so the final power consumption is not known either.
"eldentyrell" is going to be selling this bitstream is this FPGA company thinking of licensing it?
Yes we are.
I'm not sure how eldentyrell is going to be selling it.... I sent him a email asking about licensing and power requirements but he wouldn't give up any info, he just told me to wait until later this month when he announces it. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.