Topic: Nanominer - Modular FPGA Mining Platform (Read 18923 times)

How easily would this scale up to something along the lines of this: http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/EK-V7-VC707-G.htm

Or its wicked big brother the XC7V2000T?

If you read more carefully you'd notice I have no intention of using a Cyclone V. What I said was, when the new series is released it will hopefully mean price improvements on the chips that are currently giving 200 MH/s.

Verifiable: That is to say, I'm not developing a particularly novel bitstream, it's widely understood and proven that with the chips available to us we can get 200 MH/s.  The parts for the rest of it are available to purchase now, and once decisions are made on feature sets I will post what those parts are.  Again, verifiable, already in existence, not some insane thing that I need to prove.  The rest is PCB design, programming, and construction, all of which I am quite capable of doing.

Feel free to preface your comments by saying you didn't read carefully if you didn't.

Where are they? For spartan 6 there are ztex,icarus and the X6500 and for the cycloneV no datasheet, prices nor chips you can buy.

But stop, there was something,


very funny, but exact, verifyable numbers

We're going dedicated. And reasonable, no more pies in the sky, just verifiable numbers and efficient design.
It all continues here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/nanominer-announcement-68352

Everything depends on hardware. If you buy some old dev kit with ancient chips then forget about mining. New hardware=possibility of high MH/s. But propably very pricey...
FPGAs on widely avaible dev kits have big disadvantage, price. There is just to many things on board thats are not needed. And mostly VRM's  on that boards are not good enough to deliver required amount of power.

so nanominer will work on an FPGA hardware?  lets say i stumble on a dev kit at a great price, but its not one used before for bitcoin, would there be any required optimization, or special steps needed?

Never?
He only promised to deliver an IP core. Not a hardware.
IP= Intelectual Property.

Move along....

@inspector

can you inform us when you get the miner ?


@wondermine

can you tell us when we can expect an working fpga miner to buy ?

greetings
pazor

The least expensive Stratix IV kit seems to be Terasic's DE4, which retails for $2,995
Currently wondermine gets 800 MH/s on it (but obviously, future improvements in hash rate are a distinct possibility).
But right now, that's about $3.75 per MH/s. 

BFL Single: $600 for 800 MH/s, which is about $0.75 per MH/s.

I guess, I'll take the BFL Single (in fact, I just ordered four more of them this morning). 

You can find your answer by reading through the posts or re-checking the first post, or my site.  The FPGA currently is running at 800MH/s verified.
As far as it costing you, the software is free, and like I've said, I'll be publishing it after crunch time is over at school.  Donations, however, are always welcome.


Not related to BTC mining, but I have about 12 Arduinae among other microcontroller dev boards (PIC, ARM) here or in my lab.
They're great boards, they will not, like the man says, generate BTC though.  If you have a specific question feel free to email me; this thread should probably be kept to BTC talk.

Still doing exams, thought I'd pop my head up.

In Spartan6, the ternary addition uses only ~2ns. The routing delays - and ISE's inability to
consistently minimize them - are a bigger problem.

-rph

What do you want to know about it?
It's not a FPGA and if it is possible to mine on it, it would be very slow and no networksupport on it.
Maybe a normal pc can mine faster in just the time it takes to talk to this thing.

who test this ?
http://www.buyincoins.com/details/arduino-nano-v3-0-avr-atmega328-p-20au-moudle-board-with-usb-cable-product-10178.html

In your first post you claim "I have a modified core running on a Stratix IV at 3.6GH/s"

I do not ask for anything more than that. Is this part true ?

How much would it cost me to have your software that run on it ?

Thanks for the update and good luck on exams. I'm just a curious bystander to all that is BTC. I find the FPGA solution to be the most interesting part. I think you know that the BTC world has tons of frauds and many on these forums. So the questions are partly a legit-test too.

FPGA combined with free energy sources will dominate the mining world. I'm sure someone's working on a mining asic and they may be able to go faster and use less power but the price will be high.

Sorry for the delays in update, it's exam time and I'm pretty busy.
To answer a few questions:

Regarding "reinventing the wheel": I'm all for working from what there is, but I'm doing this project partially as a way to augment my understanding of circuit design, HDL design, cryptography/analysis, and mathematics.  I will build my own IP for things if I deem it educational.  Will that slow things down? Sometimes. Will that also potentially improve the final product? Possibly. I'm not doing this project because it's so lucrative... it's not.  It's educational.

Regarding when you can see the code: I'll be uploading it I have in entirety to my website once I'm finished exams, it just needs to be commented and some translated into VHDL from Verilog.

Regarding whether this project is official or has a greenlight: Simply put, nope.  This is entirely of my own volition, all funding is from donations, and the time is what I can spare when I'm not designing vehicle and robotics control systems, doing homework, or attempting to have a social life.

Another comment I'd like to make regarding the design of Nanominer:  This project will be the best I/we can make it; however I know there are a lot of people working on FPGA mining technology, and I may well not have the technical edge; I certainly don't have the time/funding.  My hope is, despite the possible disadvantages, is to have it be fully open-source and extremely well documented, I'd love to make something that any of you can download and modify to your liking or improve upon with ease, Bitcoin is a great platform on which to learn a lot of topics.  The "edge" I hope for in this project is a mathematical one, which may be a pipe dream, or never work, and I won't let it get in the way of Nanominer being what we want it to, but I will put time into mathematical research, even if it seems like a dead end to people.

If you're looking for a good, solid community project you can help work on and improve, with someone at the head who's willing to learn and improve, this is for you.  I'm not here to make money, I'm here to learn.  If that bothers you, there are a lot of other projects for FPGA who are interested in profits.

I'll keep you all posted, and I'll let you know when exams are finished, that should give me a decent amount of time to get things going.

Does this project have a greenlight? Is this a college project too? How much funding do you have so far?

As far as I understand, long wires don't come into the picture much when you enter a counter-pattern on the left, let it percolate through 128 stages and then wind up with a yes/no value on the right. Rather, I think the 5ns clock cycle is due to two sequential 32 bit additions, implemented with ripple carries. 
The irony is that FPGAs have hardware multipliers (in the DSP blocks), but few or no hardware adders. (I think there is an adder in each DSP block also, feeding into the multiplier, but there are not enough of them.)

FPGA fabric frequencies have been stuck around 200-300MHz for 10+ years
because, while the LUTs are still getting (slightly) faster, the wires between them aren't.

So you have to go wider instead of faster.

-rph

I misread the offering, I thought they had a free version and a commercial version but you have to go through sales to get the SDK.
And it's not clear what they offer in the SDK. I got to that site from another site that made it sound like something different.