Is this board sensible for FPGA mining?

karasu

newbie

Activity: 38

Merit: 0

Oh, I wouldn't buy it from ebay, it's waaay overpriced there. I think I might be able to get it with the casing (sold separately of course) for around 200-210e. That said, I wish I had other nostalgia hobby sometimes, SNES seems so much cheaper Wink

To be honest I don't want to make thousands out of it, just to be able to substantialy lower the cost of the board by mining while not playing Syndicate or UFO Wink

I remember reading somewhere on the forum about Spartan 3 500k based core utilizing 60-odd percent of the die. There was no Mh/s info though. I guess it's because number is not impressive at all Sad

No new Amiga for me than. Thanks for clarification Wink

makomk

hero member

Activity: 686

Merit: 564

Quote from: 2112 on August 19, 2012, 12:10:44 PM

Edit: I take back the "great" from the "educational toy" above. I took $127.15 as a total cost, but this is just postage. So the better description would be "great ripoff on an educational toy".

Yeah, pretty much anything involving the word "Amiga" commands a big price premium these days...

2112

legendary

Activity: 2128

Merit: 1073

Quote from: karasu on August 19, 2012, 07:56:19 AM

How much hashing power could I squeeze from XC3S400-4PQ208C?

None, unless you plan on developing your own bitstreams. And then, when you develop your own bitstream not much, because this is an old Spartan-3, not the newer Spartan-6 that is used by almost everyone else.

Great educational toy though. XC3S400 is supported by the free Xilinx ISE Webpack.

Edit: I take back the "great" from the "educational toy" above. I took $127.15 as a total cost, but this is just postage. So the better description would be "great ripoff on an educational toy".

karasu

newbie

Activity: 38

Merit: 0

There is quite interesting board with 400k Spartan FPGA designed to be Amiga hardware emulator

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MiniMig-FPGA-Motherboard-Amiga-500-600-Emulator-/160808157843#ht_4215wt_840

I guess my endgame for when ASICalypse comes will be staying with capable retro gaming machine and having it halfpriced thanks to bitcoins

How much hashing power could I squeeze from XC3S400-4PQ208C?
Will 2Mb of onboard memory will be sufficient?
Do I just dump core with hardcoded input data through JTAG?
Is there any streamlined process to prepare cores, preferably with FPGA chips to preselect from?

Thanks

Topic: Is this board sensible for FPGA mining? (Read 1539 times)