Topic: Litecoin FPGA! - page 2. (Read 10881 times)

ok cool , what are you working on ?

That is not what we are working on actually.

^^^

this is what i think a few people have been working on , i wonder who if any got it ?

where do i apply ?!!!


i've seen BitcoinExpress and the other guys work , so i know exactly what to do !

Think what you want. I'm not trying to sell anything, and on lots of things I'm not qualified as an expert. I'm not a FPGA expert, but I've consulted with them (since a lot of my friends work for those companies). I am however a computer architecture and chip design expert, and I've assumed that a FPGA runs 10-20x slower than an ASIC. I was just trying to gage interest, and I think I have a good idea. I know the thousands of caveats that come with the calculation that I did, because I've done 100s of them before, and I know how those designs turned out. Twenty years designing everything in the computer business, and I've made some fantastic things, and totally screwed things up. Luckily I've not made any multi-million dollar mistakes yet, but I've seen plenty of them. I won't ask or pontificate again without some proof for my point of view.

I will add that I did a SHA256 hardware accelerator in an ASIC 10 years ago, so I have done a similar design, and put it into an ASIC.

Oatmo

+1

Oh boy..  Here we go again (and again, and again, ad nauseum on a daily basis).  Can't we go one single day without someone armchair-engineering a hypothetical FPGA or ASIC-based scrypt miner based on a back-of-napkin calculation and immediately posting performance numbers and pricing before they've even tried to write an actual real Verilog implementation of scrypt+salsa?




The fastest way to spot someone who doesn't know what they're talking about is when they start claiming they're going to implement an FPGA scrypt miner with a cost/performance ratio exceeding GPU's, with any commercially available FPGA currently on the market (or in the process of coming onto the market).  At least you did admit that you've never done any FPGA work previously though.

Propagation times and clock fanout skew on FPGA's are extremely slow relative to ASIC clock fanout and signal routing, if that's your background.  You can achieve nowhere even close to the clock fanout and signal propagation performance on FPGA's than you may be expecting, if you're coming from an ASIC background.  If you do have an ASIC background, then pretend that you're working on a design and throwing in tens to hundreds of extra buffers or muxes (representing the switching fabric of the FPGA) on every one of your signals between logic elements, and you'll get the general idea of what you'll be dealing with performance-wise when getting info FPGA development.

A back-of-envelope calculation is not valid for making a performance claim and estimated pricing.  Your result is overoptimistic by almost an order of magnitude for any commercially available FPGA, if you're expecting a 2:1 cost/performance edge over, say, a Radeon 6xxx or 7xxx GPU.

There are only so many (known) ways to calculate scrypt+salsa(1024,1,1) between the two ends of the TMTO spectrum.  There isn't going to be something totally revolutionary unless someone devises a cryptographic attack against scrypt that significantly shortcuts the effort needed to calculate an scrypt hash.  And at that point, the same attack would be equally applicable to speeding up GPU scrypt implementations.

Is there some real, open source, project on FPGA scrypt mining?

My cost would be about $800-$850 a unit. With large numbers of units (>15000), it could maybe go to $600. It would probably take 500 units to make up my NRE costs. I can do the FPGA design with a $800 development board and figure out the performance and power. Working full time, I could do the design in about 6 weeks. Since I have a day job, I'll start messing around with it and see how long it takes. I'm pretty confident about providing the perf/$. I'm not at all confident about the power number, because I've spent 20 years doing full custom / ASIC design. I've never don'e FPGAs before, so I don't have a good feel for power consumption. I wouldn't do any system engineering until I proved to myself that it can be done.

I looked at Enterpoint's boards. If one of them had the FPGAs which fall in the sweet spot for scrypt, then they would be great, but none of them do. For them to be cost competitive, they will have to design a new product with a different line of FPGAs on the board. Looking at the product line, that product would fill a different niche for them, so I wouldn't be surprised if they did it anyways.

Oatmo

Sign me up for 100 units!!

By profit margins I was actually meaning more oatmo's margins for selling the devices (if that's what he did, rather than opensourcing the design from the start). For 7MH, you could sell it at 3K a pop and still have people line up, since you're still readily beating the price:performance of a GPU rig.

It will depend on there TPG, scrypt uses KH/s not MH/s.

7,000KH/s @ 500 watts

Profit         BTC           LTC             USD          Cost    Profit
Per Day    0.2013 BTC   9.6767 LTC    $20.56      $1.44     $19.12

If you really had something like that working ($1500 for 7MH), I'd buy a few dozen of them off you, after field testing one. I'm sure there would be a good sized line of similar individuals as well.

The big question you should be asking is... at $1500 a pop for 7MH, what would your profit margins be?

I love the fact that when you mention FPGA or ASIC chips for LTC, most members of the forum become Engineers, I wonder if I edit the content in Wikipedia to " FPGA uses the fuck bandwith to calculate salsa..."  what forum members would wirte? maybe the same words in wikipedia ? what do you think ?

 

Pop, pop, pop. 

and i'm sure they will have lots of fun,  generate lots of heat and maybe light - also a few K # and never sell a device,  when the ATI 8x series come out with DDROVER9000

and the new Quantum GPU they are working on. , that will sell at Walmart for $199 -

^^^^^All of that - i was going to say someone has underestimated the Bandwidth issue.

so someone will have to keep dreaming of a way for the market to drive diff higher - probably when ASIC take over BTC driving its diff to retard levels. - but then, ah - that's a diff problem < you see what i did there ?   : D

enterpoint.co.uk is a very respected company in UK, if they say they will do it ... they will sure will

I'm not sure how many standard pinouts the FPGAs have, but I think they are all different. If one of the FPGAs that they use happens to be optimal for litecoin mining, and they really know their hardware design, then they can do it. You need the maximal memory to minimal logic to do scrypt. No FPGA has nearly enough memory bandwidth to do the algorithm (which is why GPUs are so good at the algorithm).

BTW, in general, companies that do a lot of FPGA design have no idea how to do ASICs, and vice-versa. This is my explanation for BFL. Looking at them, they just look like they are running into what all new ASIC design companies run into. They are in over their head, and we'll see how they get out. An ASIC for scrypt would be very easy to design, but I'm not sure the ROI is there to make up for the design and tapeout costs.

I did some back of the envelop calculations myself, and while I think that scrypt can be done in a FPGA are a 2:1 cost advantage over GPUs, I'm not sure what the power will be, so I'd have to do a prototype on a development board. Not sure I want to spend all that time without knowing that a lot of people would buy it.

So, how many people would pay $1500 for a 7MH/s scrypt miner, which ran in say 500 watts? The power is just a swag. I'm pretty sure I could outdo a GPU by 2:1, just not sure if I can get it to 10:1.

Oatmo

BTW: My backgroud, I've been designing bleeding edge chips for 20 years, including the CPUs (Intel), memory controller, networking routers and switches (which coincidentally included a SHA256 accelerator in 2001), and now I work for one of the major GPU vendors designing GPUs.