Topic: Ultra-Low-Cost DIY FPGA Miner - 175MH/s @ $1/MH - page 11. (Read 125898 times)

great reply, thanks!

as I wrote, I was not sure if I understood that correctly, obviously I have not.

I don't doubt the ability of the bitcoin community, in fact I have entered this field with understanding that there will be very low (if any) level of commercial support into supporting the Bitcoin for some time, and the community of enthusiast must therefore support themselves with indigenous know-how.

And I did not thought for a second that the commercial outlets are more professional than the community.

Although I have build number of successfully business in the past, my roots are in hobby level experimentation (I am a microelectronics engineers) and not the formal R&D.

So I appreciate the long nights a self-motivated and thought person spends tackling an impossible to solve problem, where the commercial operations spend more of their day-times planing their time rather than productively solving the problem at hand.

rph, my hat goes off to you (and the others who work hard moving the FPGA projects forward)

cheers!

agree.

And these maybe come to a huge business.

I wondering about the fpga mining system venders' competition will lead fpga mining to which direction. All know the fpga mining performance is highly related with the mining code. Approx all the guys who working with fpga mining systems put at least half effort on the mining code, and hide the code. The hardware seems not important on the contrary.
good or bad?

That's a cool dream and for $100k you could get a lot more than 30GH/s from a spartan6 cluster

Even though Xilinx is playing hardball on price, we can at least get the "everything-except-Xilinx"
costs waaay down. And there is a lot of hard work going into this. I think 2012 is going to be awesome
for FPGA mining..

-rph

rph I have a vision.  A someday vision if I ever made a million via bitcoin this is what I would like to see (don't worry it isn't completely off topic).

Take a FPGA miner like what you have, maybe downclock it some so it can be passively cooled.  Integrate a powersupply, some flash ram, and ethernet jack as well as "smarts" for it to be able to connect to a server (not a traditional mining pool) to get current block data to create it's own block header with a hardcoded bitcoin address.  Now integrate all this into a nice box, w/ power plug on the backside so it simply plugs into the wall.

In essence it would be a self contained hasher, connect the network cable and it would without any configuration connect to a server, download any updates, and start hashing current block.

Now you likely are saying this would be horribly inefficient.  That isn't the point.  I would see these as "hashers of last resort".  They would be independent, autonomous, and never part of any pool.  They would provide a hedge against the deepbits of the world.  For a 100K maybe I could get 200 of these.  Have people donate the power and network connectivity (being a FGPA it would use less than $2 per year) so you would have 30GH of independent autonomous hashing power.  Any revenue from block rewards (no need for a pool because we aren't concerned about volatility) would be paid into a wallet which splits it 50% to build more "hashers of last resort" and 50% to fund bitcoin development projects.

Would such a plan be feasible given say $100K in funding?  I don't have $100K but maybe someday some bitcoin nonprofit could.  I think the idea of a distributed autonomous network of non-profit hashers would be a good counterbalance to the growing influence of super pools (top 10 pools have combined 70% of hashing power).

I was framed I tell you.  Someone must have moved my 2 key.  Seriously that happens a lot w/ me.  My brain is computing faster than the I/O bus can handle the data stream.

Bitcoin Hashes

Now when they talk about it compared to... Folding for example

I'd have to assume SHA256

So when people talk about Deepbit or the entire network for example, do they mean bitcoin hashes or sha256 hashes?

And a Bitcoin "hash" is really sha256(sha256(x)). So when most devs here say 120MH/s it
really means 240 million SHA256 computations per second.

Each SHA256 hash covers 512 bits of data. So, as you guys have said:

To convert "Mbps" to "Bitcoin MH/s" divide by 1024.
To convert "Bitcoin MH/s" to "Mbps" multiply by 1024.

-rph

1,225,000,000 bit/s / 512 = 3,392,578 2,392,578 hashes/s. 

 

still looking to buy a few of these!

It's possible but takes engineering time, and FPGA resources away from the miner.
Better to use a $3-4 USB microcontroller IMO. Or a $10 ethernet MCU if you really, really need
a standalone device. But I prefer using a $50 Atom PC to connect USB FPGA miners to the net.

PCs are cheap and most people here have one running 24/7 anyway.

-rph

The VHDL/Verilog guys in this community are top-notch and are getting results way
beyond what's possible with general-purpose SHA256 cores.

In Mbps terms, my design is around 159,744 Mbps [2 SHA256 cores * 512 bits per hash * 156 MH/s].

That 2041Mbps core is 2041/(512*2)= 1.99MH/s. You could fit maybe 30-50 of them in 6s150.

-rph

Not quite.

1225 Mbps = 1,225,000,000 bit/s.  1 SHA256 hash is 512 bits.
1225 Mbps = 1,225,000,000 bit/s / 512 = 3,392,578 hashes/s.  
1225 Mbps = 2.4 MH/s  However bitcoin algorith requires 2 hashes not 1 hash per bitcoin hash.  So that's 1.2 MH/s.

That number is still likely high because they are showing streaming performance (where key in static) and you are streaming huge amounts of data through the chip.  Bitcoin doesn't work that way so you have the setup and takedown overhead on each hash.  Likely performance for bitcoin applications would be 10% to 20% lower.

I have looked most FPGA commercial designs are optimized for streaming (massive input and output to hash large amounts of data).  Totally outclassed by any FPGA design prototypes on bitcointalk.

Edit: fixed math.

No, in the table, in the "Max SHA256 rate" for "Spartan-6 -3" indicates 1,225 Mbps and elsewhere at that site, they claim "one clock per algorithm round" - I am calculating that if one hash is 512 bytes then 1,225 / 0.5 = 2,392 Mhash/sec.

[EDIT] Wait a minute - I think I found my mistake  - the hash is in bytes and the bandwidth is in Mbps - which means I should divide the 2,392 by 8 - still 299 Mhash/s - much better than what we see in these forums.

[EDIT AGAIN] I not very good with these bits/bytes, but from this source http://www.s2cinc.com/product/pd.asp?id=278 it looks like the hash is actually 512 bits, hence the original calculations apply and the performance would stand at 2,392 Mhash/sec.

if your refering to  "max SHA-1 rate 2041 Mbps 1542 Mbps 2578 Mbps"


I am not sure if Mbps equates to Mhash/s .  first I dont know if they mean Mega bytes per sec, or mega bits per sec, but it is definitely not mega hashes per sec.

Please someone jump in here who knows...  because this helion chip would be HUGE>

rph, great work, I have finally find courage to subscribe to this thread...

I have couple of comments/suggestions.

Have you though of adding ETH PHY and SD card modules to the carrier board so once the bit-stream is uploaded (written on the SD), the unit could be set to survive hardware reset and run fully autonomously?

I am sure implementing compact TCP/IP stack and HTML server on the FPGA would not be that difficult (many available open source examples out there), and the required Bitcoin function, to feed the hashes to the FPGA and then feed the result back to a pool, should be relatively easy to code, re-write one of the better Python miner-scripts.

Also, with regards to the efficiency of the core - correct me if I understand this wrong - I see that professional outlets achieve 2.4 Gh/s with a Spartan 6 -3 (at least that is what I conclude after reading the document posted here http://www.heliontech.com/downloads/fast_hash_xilinx_datasheet.pdf#view=Fit - and that is way more efficient compared to the various FPGA implementations discussed on the bitcointalk.

Otherwise - the mere fact that you guys already achieved capital cost of $1/Mh in single chip quantities (that's what my highly-cost-optimised GPU rigs cost me, in QTY>10) indicates that you are on the right track - and things can only improve from here.

good @ BGA soldering? pretty good.

+1

im good @ soldering, and confident in hacking stuff
but building something this complex without a guide? no can do

i bet that a build guide would sell pretty good

Those guys are all really on to something for the end users; but for people like myself, who have at least some hardware knowledge and feel confident taking risks, I would gladly pay you for comprehensive build guide.

Thanks for all the comments guys. Dunno if I'm gonna productize/sell this stuff..
I'm doing it for fun, to sharpen my engineering skills and push the technology...
and of course to build a low-cost rig for myself..

ztex, big-chip-small-board, and the fpgaminer product are the best options ATM for fully assembled/tested HW

-rph