Topic: Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs. - page 3. (Read 41463 times)

It would probably be useful to make an entry-level unit with just one chip on the card, as the lower you keep the cost of entry the more sales you will probably be able to make.

-MarkM-

I've done the back-of-the-envelope math on this. It is doable. The problem is the up front cost is around $2,000,000 to do it right.

The target ASIC would use the fully-unrolled design that's already used by the FPGA miner. The design goal would be to fit 4 fully-unrolled miners on a chip. The target frequency would be around 350Mhz, one double-hash per miner per clock. That would mean 1.4GHash/s per chip if all goals are met. The chip would draw around 50W. You could put four on a card and connect it to a USB port.

The cost per ASIC would be under $100 plus a share of the development costs. So it all comes down to how many chips you can make/sell. That would give you a 5.6GHash/s mining peripheral for around $650 including baseboard, cooling, power supply, and so on, but not including the cost of development.

To have it make business sense to borrow money to fund the development (assuming you could even arrange it), you'd have to be able to sell the miners for $1,500 each or so and you'd have to be able to sell 5,000 units. I think people would pay $1,500 for 5.6GHash/s at 250W, but I'm not sure 5,000 units would sell, especially as early sales raise the difficulty. (And if that happened, the total network hashing power would jump to three times what it is now!)

An ASIC would be interesting, provided it does not cost a lot. Also, selling the ASICs would be good business, since if the ASIC outperforms GPU (which it will, most likely), everyone will start using them and those who still use GPUs will fall behind, since the difficulty will increase, much in the same way as with GPU vs CPU mining in the past.

If the cost is comparable to a GPU (or at least a PC with the GPU), including shipping to Lithuania, I'll most likely buy some. It's always fun to play with electronics.

Highly interested

I for one am sure I'll be buying the first aisc that the community produces capable of this. Although I'm somewhat amazed no aisc for something like sha hashing it's available already. Then again cpus are probably enough for servers that encrypt their data using it... Out of curiosity has anyone thought about what chips the self encrypting hard drives use?

So is this actually happening? Or was it just noise? Or what?

-MarkM-

Change your email settings to something it's not.  Try "null".  What other reason would you have your real email address registered at this forum, if not to receive notices?

the notify button, also sends you a mail

Thanks for letting us know, guys, but please use the notify button next time.

Watching this thread.

So what's going on? Can I already buy some board?

I am quite sure that the community is going to provide this regardless of whether our commercialization effort is a success, and having multiple options to choose from will only strengthen Bitcoin. A few things to keep in mind for the community effort, based on what we have learned from our many years of commercializing ASIC designs:

1. The NRE (non-recurring engineering costs) are truly stunning for ASIC production, unless you use simple techniques like a gate-array, which have performance and density drawbacks;

2. ASICs are a "wild west" business, and a great deal of haggling and negotiating is required to get a reasonable price out of the various service providers you'll need to work with to get chips made; and,

3. There are numerous physical pitfalls that can render a design completely useless, introducing delays and increased costs - for example, you may find that you've made a tiny error that can't be corrected in software.

Cool - glad you like the idea. I can see why the GPU vendors guard their drivers, because there is a lot of intelligence in the driver. In our case, the management software and drivers are not giving away much. Just making an ASIC requires a huge NRE investment; and of course we know that the guts of the chip are not rocket science, save for a few careful optimizations. By contrast, the guts of a GPU are rocket science.

I wanted to share some of the results of the above-mentioned survey link. The following pie chart breaks down (in real-time -- thanks, Google Docs!) the community's feedback regarding what would cause them to move from GPU mining to ASIC mining.

I'd just like to have the complete design open source, i.e. that I can produce my own chips with enough money.
I think this is what we will have in the end and certainly need as well to keep a dezentralized currency.
Greets, M

It does of course make sense to sell ready-to-use mining units in one or another way. However, I'd expect that the community would build some alternative mining platforms based on your ASIC if you sell the raw chip as well. As you're probably making the big money with the chip and not the board, this might actually increase revenue, as it will probably increase the total number of ASICs sold. (Some enthusiasts would certainly build their own mining rigs based on your chip, and possibly sell those as well.)


If I interpret your answers from above correctly, you're focusing on a standalone mining solution, and not PCIe accelerator cards. I think that's the long-term way to go. This means that the external interface of it is most likely ethernet, with possibly some additional daisy chaining interface.
Oh, and as I said above, if you focus on this, just sell the raw ASICs as well, and let the community care about how to do a PCIe card solution if they want that.


That's nice to hear
Don't make the same mistakes as certain GPU vendors

We haven't determined this yet, but I would argue it's most likely that we'll be selling complete mining units rather than individual processors. There are applications for Bitcoin technology outside of the public Bitcoin network, and we want to address these opportunities, which don't have an active hobbyist community behind them.


I can't comment on this yet, except to say that you'll be really delighted by the interface choice. It will permit very easy management of a mining cluster with "zero configuration".


Documentation will be provided - as I said in my post, we really want the community to get involved in building tools and services around the hardware.

Wow.
You sound exactly like one of those middle-aged drill sergeants from Vietnam.
Sure you weren't in the marines?

Do you go online with a large pocket calculator and 28k dial-up?

Sent you a few bitcoins.

Subscribe. Sorry for not contributing anything, but I haven't a clue about hardware stuff (my geekiness stops at the kernel).

Could you elaborate on some questions, which I believe are not interfering with your competetive reasons, but might be helpful for the community to prepare?
- Will the ASIC itself be sold by your company (or e.g. through digikey)?
- Will ready-to-use boards containing your ASIC be sold by as well, or should the community handle that?
- Have you already decided on the ASICs external interface?
- Are you planning to sell PCIe mining boards based on your ASIC?
- If yes, will the ASIC itself have a PCIe interface, or will the ASICs have a more simple interface, with multiple ASICs connecting to some controller that handles the PCIe interface? (I would strongly encourage the latter)
- Are you planning to sell standalone mining boards, equipped with ethernet and some small CPU running linux, doing the highlevel work? (Not having a PCIe interface for the individual ASICs would pay off here, I'd really like to have an ARM-based backplane connecting to like 8 miner boards containing 8 or 16 ASICs each, even if that thing might cost a fair bit of money.)
- Will there be a public datasheet for the device, which contains physical/electrical/thermal specifications along with a specification of the software interface (I2C register map or something)? (I consider this way more useful than e.g. an open source linux driver. This is work that the community can do for you if you provide the specs.)

i'm skipping the gpu fad. never bought a computer that came with a video card. dont mind buying a custom fgpa or asic.
anyone not accounting for moores law is retarded.
also, THANK YOU Mr. Tremblay, this community needs to work like a well oiled machine if bitcoin is to succeed.
also, WHEN CAN MY 3D PRINTER CREATE ASIC FISHES N CHIPS?