Well guys, I had planned on updating everyone with a video of a board hashing here in KC tonight, but I haven't been able to get that together yet, so I'm probably going to have to push it off until tomorrow. We are targeting a start of shipment next week, but I'm not quite ready to commit to that at the moment, given our past estimates. It's imminent, though.
I know Chip Geek, I'm going to try to ship out a unit ,at least one, before APril first if it's at all possible.
Chip Geek, I'm not sure. We may miss our power targets, that's been part of hte hold up... we think there's a problem with the power consumption and we're trying to figure out where it's having an issue. However, in the interests of time, we are going to be shipping what we have and going back and fixing while we are shipping, just so people can have their units. People are welcome to wait for the revised boards that should help out with the power issue if they want to delay their shipments... (heh, riiiight).
The power is still far less than any other unit, so it's not like it's something crazy or anything, but it's not 1w/GH and we're trying to locate the source of the power drain. It may require a revision of the substrate and/or the PCB.
Haha it's WAYYY less than 620 watts even at it's worst.
What's causing even more consternation is the fact that the wafer we burned for tests runs at far less power than a second wafer we mounted on the BGA package... so it may be a wafer by wafer thing, and sicne we only have two datapoints, it's hard to nail down the issue. We're rolling the other 4 wafers off the line shortly (they may be done already I think) - and that wil at least give us an idea of the power consumption between wafers with 6 data points.
Bogart, the rest of the 6 wafers, we have been holding off on the last 5 layers for the rest of the chips to be sure we don't need to make a tweak in the metal layer due to the power issue. I think we've pretty much settled that hte power issue is NOT in the chip, but somewhere in the substrate or PCB (or if it were in the chip, it's not something that's easily and quickly fixed).
Barrett: Depends on the power draw, it may be that the power draw is too high for the board and we need to scale the hashrate back. If that's the case, we'll send multiple units to cover the hashrate difference for orders.
SgtSpike: We are trying to nail it down. We have some boards at 1.76w, some at 2.5 and some at 4 and one at 6 <- although I think the ones at 4 and 6 have either a broken power regulator and/or a bad power brick, because they power brick is only 120w and it's drawing like 195 watts which is ridiculous. When I get hte firmware here in KC, I'll be running it off of an ATX PSU to eliminate the power brick as the culprit. So you see, this is why the power issue is causing some difficulties
Yes, I'm aware that Bitcointalk trolls will have a field day with everything I've just said. Heh. Even a broken power regulator and a bad power brick is still better than an Avalon, but in all honesty, at this point with bitcoin prices at 90 bucks a coin, I'm thinking no one is going to care at hte moment they just want to hash. Which is why we'll be shipping and then improving as we go.
If the cooling becomes an issue, like I said, we'd scale it back and ship multiple units.
Smith88: We will ship whatever we have to to get people hashing at their expected GH.
Lap_Rat: No, worst case is 195w, but the power systems on the board aren't rated to handle that really I don't think, so we'd back off the hashrate before we'd let it get that high.
Yeah I think 120w is a nice comfortable number. It can probably got a bit higher than that, but 195w is probably not where we want to be.
ROFL, thats not better then a fuckin avalon! Avalon has been shipping, BFL has not ...