Topic: [PicoStocks] 100TH/s bitcoin mine [100th] - page 83. (Read 470099 times)

whoa..does that mean we're getting a 65% speed boost?!

We will try to offer hardware but this is not priority now. It is a lot of additional work.
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Tapeout is on Wednesday. We had additional delay because we had to investigate the option to use other process corners (the foundry provides also the option to produce fast transistors (FF model)). We found little advantage of using the FF corner at or above 0.6V, but after some additional simulations we found that the chips would work very nice in the FF corner at 0.50V - 0.55V. To be able to operate at this voltage not only the hashing cores but also the IO transistors must be "tuned". We made sure the chips will work at that voltage.
Provisional estimations are below:
vdd   m   gh/s   watt   gh/J
0.60   tt   3.34   0.96   3.49
0.60   ff   8.02   3.67   2.18
0.55   ff   6.84   2.23   3.07
0.50   ff   5.51   1.38   3.99
[m: model, tt: standard, ff: fast transistors]
=> at 0.5V we get faster chips that have higher gh/joule than tt chips at 0.6V
Of course these are just simulations.
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We understand the the most important is timing of deployment. We loos a lot of money with every day of delay. We still think start on July 1st is feasible. We selected a packaging facility that is in the same city as the foundry so we hope to have the packaged chips in house end of May. The rest is fast :-)

I really hope you release retail products and not only to Poland but at least for whole EU. Little bit of competition with Avalon would be good and we will need some manufacturer in Europe too.

That said... I might still invest for some shares.

I totally agree and we understand this. Timing is crucial and we have only a couple of months to make serious profits. Bitfury did not sleep for last 2 days :-)

I would not delay too much over speculation that the 28nm project is real (and will deliver on time). For example, if you had plans of building ASICS in the summer, but scraped those plans due to BFL announcing delivery in Oct/Nov, then you'd have shot yourself in the foot (announcing early had the benefit of dissuading potential competitors from entering the market).

You only have control over what you can deliver and if you think you can deliver by Jun/Jul, then you should still have plenty of time to recoup costs (and profit handsomely) even if 28nm hits the market at the same time. The current hash rate and BTC price are much better than your original business plan had anticipated, so time-to-market is even more important now than it was before.

tl;dr - Don't worry about beating the 28nm project. If you meet your timelines, you are/will be competitive with them in the short term...the most important (profitable) timeframe.

This is somewhat analogous to ASICMiner vs BFL. ASICMiner started later with weaker technology, but are now making a killing because they met their timelines.

We will see. This depends on the 28nm chip [price and foreseen number of chips on market].
Yes, probably already in May we will try 28nm MPW (either also ST or another foundry).
Sure, but we have to find out the pricing. The authors has a quite strange approach to the 28nm chip production. We would go for full mask if we were them.
No, mainly because the parameters of the 28nm chip were released few day ago. We are trying to find places were we can still optimize the chip. My guess is we need 2 more days.
Based on our estimations the 28nm chip should be 4 times more power efficient and 10 times cheaper, so competition is futile :-) but we still want to get as high as possible with the 55nm design to have a good start for 28nm.
My guess is that the 28nm authors are either from ST directly or from CMP (close partner). It will be very difficult to compete with such an experienced team :-(

I may have missed it in the business plan, but what is your long term plan for this project? After the initial 100TH deployment, are you planning on creating another batch using the same technology? starting a new project on new tech? Would you consider sourcing chips from the 28nm project?

BTW, did you submit the final design to the foundry today?

thanks!

Check this funding program first: http://www.parp.gov.pl/index/index/597 ... there are others but I think this one could have least requirements. I know people who fund BTC equipment from it. In other countries programs like this exists too (US: SBIR grants?).

hi tytus

can you give me some more details on this by pm,could set up a polish company if needed

thanks

Thanks for the usability tips. We will have to review everything and make changes.

Regarding retail sales. Who would want to have hardware in house ? There are only few reasons I see:
- You want to use this for heating
- You need to comply with some strange funding requirements [Poland]
- You want to prevent 51% attacks

Offering retail sales is a pain, but I think there will be some partners who will eventually offer this [same as in the 28nm project]. But before thinking about this we need to monitor the 'competition'. It will be more important for us to decide how to handle the 28nm STmicroelectonics chip than to think about alternative forms of sales.

I think if you change the colors of the links on the right side of the account page, it will make it more apparent that you can actually click on those (e.g. links to Balance, Invested, Bids, Profit, Last Transaction).
The "action" at the upper right is also easily missed. Maybe move that closer to the middle of the screen and/or change the color.

Interesting to see you have potential plans to offer hardware for sale. Would that be hardware you phase out as you upgrade to newer technology or do you plan on becoming a full on retailer (eventually).

@RHA ... I have added list of ASK and BID orders to the users home page. Most people had problems to find the link to the pages with these and did not know how to cancel orders. The page needs much more work :-) I will fix the plots and try to make the page more flexible so that You can view this also on smaller monitors :-) ... the page is far from usability standards :-(
@RHA ... regarding 'description' , I would not know where to start. The best way to learn dealing with such systems is to open a free Forex demo account. I do not recommend trading with real money there :-)

@papamoi ... we plan to offer hardware for solo mining but most likely for the Polish market. The hardware will be expensive but in Poland You can get public funding for this and save 50%-80% of costs [You can push it to 100% if You are lucky :-)] the hardware may be available in Q3 2013.

hi is there anyway to have a machine for solo mining?

Fixed.
I like the simplicity of the pages. Good, effective, old school.
(However, sometimes a description would be helpful - not everyone is a stock guru.)

Small holders usually add liquidity.
At least this I hope to have fixed now.

Not much trading volume on the site. Anyone wanting to dump a block of shares? Looks like not too many big holders of this.

BTW is http://picostocks.com/stocks/users/19/page:2 broken for other people? It seems to stay on page 1 for me.

We submit the final design on Monday. Preliminary foundry tests have been passed successfully.

going to fabrication soon?

Next update on the 14th the latest (here too).

Thank you. I think regular updates here every two weeks or so, would be welcome.