First off all, I really appreciate your view on this, zefir. So don't get me wrong in the following points.
before this thread fully turns into a source of misinformation and FUD, I want to herein try to limit the noise by clarifying those facts I am aware of.
Thats exactly the point. Since almost three weeks there was not a single (official) reaction from bitmine.
This is was I (and I assume most of the previous posters here) really makes me p***ed off.
Chips
Believe it or not: there is no chip packaging facility in Europe. Therefore, the wafers produced by GF in Dresden were sent to China for packaging and will be returned back to Switzerland for testing / assembly.
Just for your info: Dresden is not in Switzerland so they will not be returned "back to Switzerland"
Just kidding
But back to serious:
since you seem to have more infos than any other (regular) customer I am still not sure which Scenario actually fits the post from giorgiomassa on Dec 10th.
- did they learn about the delay on Dec 10th and the three week delay in packaging has to be measured from then => first packaged chip available on Dec 31st
- did they learn about the delay on Dec 10th and the three week delay in packaging has to be measured from a previous date => why the hell did they not notice before the delay?
- did they learn about the delay before Dec 10th and just did not tell us => *can't find words for that one*
SoftwareAs announced
here, I was supplied with an FPGA chip emulator to develop a cgminer SPI driver for the A1. The initial version was released some days ago, and with that, there is a tool available to mine with the A1 as soon as the chips are assembled. On top of that base functionality, the features currently being worked on are
- support for clusters of autonomous chip chains for modularity
- un-brickable FW upgrade to mature SW in the field
- user-defined / auto balance of hashrate vs. power consumption
- GUI
This list is sorted after priorities, and a GUI is obviously not on its top. I personally am fine to have the GUI provided by cgminer's miner.php, but there will also be a 'polished' Web-UI available.
I asked them about a manual or at least a preview.
a) this would increase my confidence into the product, the company and the possibility of on-time-delivery.
b) this should help me, prepare everthing at home, so I can fire off, right after unpackaging my rig.
c) some more detailed specs would have been nice, e.g. if I am right, the power consumption was estimated conservative. So some more precise figures would have been favorable
At the end of November, they assured me, that a Manual and a GUI preview will be available soon.
I assume they have to wait themselves for the Chips for the final release of the Software&manual. However a preview would have been nice how it is planned to look like. But no reaction so far.
Hope this helps to limit the current speculation. Please understand that I can't be more specific than this, but I am quite confident that we will hear significant news from Bitmine officials soon.
As I said at the beginning, their communication to their customers is just bad. Otherwise the would be no room for speculations.
And I also expect "soon" a reaction to my ticket about shifting my updated order back to its original delivery date for more than a week now. And despite the public holdidays, we did have some workdays in between...
Anyhow, I am looking forwards to your optimistic prophecy and expect some good News withing the next feew days - based on giorgiomassas post we still believe, that the january Batches are deliverd on time (which is not equal to an up to 10 day delay without Penalty!)
And there is really no Point in posting in january that the january Batches are delayed. We most probably notice this just by ourselves...
So please, zefir, take this one back to bitmine:
Thanks Zefir, much appreciated - you should feedback to BitMine that they need to do this kind of thing more often to stop the FUD growing.
And while you are talking to them, theres another Thing that makes me angry:
After several times I did Point this out to their customer Support, they still give a shit about the wrong information they state on their Homepage:
- after a full week they at least updated the description of the rig upgrade module from their old 150GHs to the new 250GHs device.
- they still include the old 250GHs Rig configuration in the description - I really do hope that a 0.5THs Rig does not only 0.35THs in turbo mode...
- If I have a rig with 8 modules (=> 2THs nominal power) I would expect 8*350GHs = 3THs in turbo mode and not only 2.8THs how they stated (based on this assumption also all other turbo mode figures are wrong...).