Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs. - page 4.

ttul

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Quote from: Rodyland on June 13, 2011, 07:52:12 PM

Quote from: FlappySocks on June 13, 2011, 07:42:54 PM

We better get our skates on as a community before someone else does it. Somebody somewhere will be working on a GPU killer, and keeping it for themselves.

This, times 10.

I have posted this elsewhere in the forum, but perhaps because I'm a new user, people haven't noticed. I'm actively working with a group of experienced product managers and ASIC engineers to build a Bitcoin ASIC, and expect first units to arrive in September or October. This is a well financed project, and we will likely eclipse what the community can do through Kick Starter. This is not to say that the community should not build its own ASIC - I just don't want people to be pouring their life savings into Kick Starter only to be surprised that some startup has surpassed them.

We know that our product will be valueless unless we support the Bitcoin community and encourage the kind of grass roots engineering that has taken the system so far in such a short time. To this end, we are planning to make as much of the design open as we possibly can; for example, the device drivers will be completely open source to encourage innovation. For obvious competitive reasons, the digital design will remain proprietary.

I don't want to say more about the product at this time; however, if you are interested in getting on our announcement list or if you have suggestions for us, please visit the form at the following address:

http://www.largecoin.com

Thanks,
The LargeCoin Team

Rodyland

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Quote from: FlappySocks on June 13, 2011, 07:42:54 PM

We better get our skates on as a community before someone else does it. Somebody somewhere will be working on a GPU killer, and keeping it for themselves.

This, times 10.

FlappySocks

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We better get our skates on as a community before someone else does it. Somebody somewhere will be working on a GPU killer, and keeping it for themselves.

vx609e

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Quote from: Sukrim on June 12, 2011, 08:08:19 AM

My issue with all of this is, that the hadware spec won't be Open Source, only the finished ("compiled") chips should be sold.

Sorry, but this approach creates a centralized entity again. If it's really so hard and expensive anyways to produce ASICs, you could open source the hardware plan anyways, as there won't be someone else to copy it who has not a few million bucks to play with.

I won't develop (or help developing) anything that in the end will only output a centralized miner chip that noone can audit (who says this design I implement doesn't use 10% of it's power to submit my private shares?) or improve. It is my believe that as much about Bitcoin as possible should be open source - this includes miners in software AND hardware!

The hardware effort is already in the open source realm: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9047.0;all
Maybe it will be required to make extra hardware mechanism to ensure integrity of the deployed computational power.

Once the chip exists, it only a matter to make it available to hardware developers (e.g.: make it buyable from digikey.com) that will be able to cook up hardware around the chip. Right now all the money is going to AMD...I think it would be more decentralized if we could all build our own hardware.

I say let's make a project on www.kickstarter.com (in the technology/open hardware section) to get as much cash as possible and let's build the damn thing. Projects on kickstarter have gathered as much as 300-400k$ in the past...so it's possible to put some real money togther. People could fund the project by pre-ordering their board. Funds should go to and be managed by bitcoin founders/bitcoin.org...the chip's IP too.

speeder

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PredX - AI-Powered Prediction Market

Throw that on GLBSE!!!! PLEASE!

I would gadly invest on that, even if the return is 0 Cheesy

TheSeven

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FPGA Mining LLC

Quote from: ahtremblay on June 11, 2011, 01:14:57 AM

I think there as been a misunderstanding. If not, then I apologize. But, I do not intend to simply release the design, as an "open source" file. I intend to finance the construction of a batch of ASICs chip based on a design, and sell them at cost-to-produce. So that miners can use them.

This can very well be interpreted as "not just open source, but also affordable physical chips, as doing that on your own isn't affordable", and if this is the intention here, that's perfectly fine.

He's basically taking all the financial risk, and only asks for some help on the design/software side. The only scam I could imagine is that he builds the chips with our help and then decides to use them all for his own mining instead of selling them at affordable prices as promised.

To get back to the technical aspects:
Why do you only get 8MHz out of that circuit? How is it constructed? All the SHA256 rounds in one huge tree of combinational logic? Or is it pipelined?
Do I understand correctly that each SHA256 unit on it gets a throughput of one hash per clock? How deep is the pipeline, i.e. how many clocks is the delay between input data arrival and result availability?

njloof

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Casper, great, you've made your point. Now please settle down and prepare to either accept your kudos for being right or to give your apologies if you are wrong.

Rodyland

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Quote from: ?? on ??

I have to raise a red flag as this could be a potential investor scam. Here is something to consider when evaluating the OP's intention.

Name:    Rodyland
Posts:    19 (3.167 per day)
Date Registered:    June 06, 2011, 04:20:54 am
Posted at June 12, 2011, 09:38:41 am:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14910.msg206771#msg206771

"You're not seeing the big picture (or at least a different picture to the one I see).

Imagine a world where btc is the default currency used in online transactions...So who mines, given that mining is necessary for the integrity of the system? The answer - everybody...Maybe only gets a few hundred MHash/sec (we're talking dedicated custom built hardware), but there are hundreds of millions of these things around the world. We're talking Peta-hashes now."

Big number of customers...

None of the accounts have associated content such as an e-mail or website URL.

Best regards,
Casper

You are a conspiracy theorist nut. My profile has an email, I just choose not to show it publicly. I don't have a website of my own. You want my TFN? (That's tax file number, closest Aussie equivalent to an SSN I believe).

Tool.

ijuz

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Quote from: ahtremblay on June 12, 2011, 04:46:42 PM

I asked for help developing the software by contributing free time to the project.

The software looks like the most simple part of such a project, IMO.

ahtremblay

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Casper,

Where have I asked for money? I asked for help developing the software by contributing free time to the project. Granted, 1 forum member has privately expressed interest to invest and I have started talks with this person. I said, I will finance this project. If anything, I should be the one worried about getting scammed. I received a bunch of emails from people will little to no experience or knowledge offering help for a fee. If anything, I should be worried that their design won't work, making me waste my money.

If I say that I will finance the design of an ASIC board and release the design for free. As well as order a batch based on the design and also release that affordable. Of course people will say its a good idea... since there is no disadvantages or risk to anyone. Why would anyone say its a bad idea.

Modoki

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well, is it really a call for investors?
There would need to be some hardware guys with a reputation or an escrow service.
they see cash, they start to develop.
asic is done, op tells it is done. people set up a pledge if it is released, he releases it and receives the pledge.
sounds like a neat idea, doesn't it?
greets, m

Modoki

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I still would think the very best Idea would be to open source the layout and design in the first place.
If you want to produce them as well, go on, people who are not able to produce their own will buy yours.
So why don't just go both ways?
Greets, M

max3t

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I just want to say that I find this whole ASIC-Thing very interesting and a great engagement. If I'd be sure that I could get those babies running, I would throw say a thousand bucks in the ring.

As for high initial costs we could open a website which tracks the spendings from each member to the project and then calculate the board price as "sum of expenses / boards delivered".
Then at first only a small amount could be produced (for say 1500$ per unit). Later when a second (equally large) order needs to be placed in china, resulting in a price of 500$ because no more design etc has to be done, the overall price would be 1000$ bucks, which every board would cost then. then the members who payed 1500$ initially would have like 500$ cash-back or discount on further boards. they would practically a board for free.
As I stated above both orders were equally large, so you notice that this calculation makes no sense. but you get the idea, hmm? Wink

foo

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Following.

LegitBit

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How about Thunderbolt?

Apple's usage is limited to 10W on laptops, but since it is based on PCIE (it IS pcie)) it could deliver 75W on desktops.

http://www.intel.com/technology/io/thunderbolt/index.htm

Quote from: phillipsjk on June 11, 2011, 09:59:54 PM

Quote from: Sukrim on June 11, 2011, 11:25:48 AM

Quote from: itsagas on June 11, 2011, 10:30:44 AM

zero scaling ability

USB hubs vs. PCIe splitters... just look up the prices!

Ethernet or USB (2.0 or 3.0) would be the way to go for sure (with Ethernet, you could do PoE and USB also allows electricity transport...)

As least USB 2.0 is limited to 2.5 Watts (5V, 500mA) I think USB 3.0 may have a high current mode, but am not sure.

Power over Ethernet is limited to about 15 watts (48V, 350mA).

In the FPGA thread they are talking 8 watts per chip. While less than the ~200Watts drawn by the GPU miners, it is still significant enough to kill the scalability you cite.

TheSeven

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FPGA Mining LLC

Quote from: Sukrim on June 12, 2011, 08:08:19 AM

Sorry, but this approach creates a centralized entity again. If it's really so hard and expensive anyways to produce ASICs, you could open source the hardware plan anyways, as there won't be someone else to copy it who has not a few million bucks to play with.

Yeah, open source the VHDL code, or even the die layout. And you still can't verify that the chips you would buy can't have been tampered with.
The only way to verify that would be building the chips yourself - which you can't do for obvious reasons.

Do you build your own GPUs and graphics cards today? You certainly don't. And a graphics card (oh, and it has a closed source firmware/driver!) could tamper with the data more easily than a pure sha256 bruteforcing accelerator ASIC (like it's being planned here) could.
The worst that the ASIC could do is not finding some shares that would have been valid. This can easily be detected, and the only way in which the vendor could profit from that is a slightly lower difficulty.

This of course assumes that the network interface isn't on the ASIC itself (which doesn't make sense for cost reasons anyway), but instead running on some PC (for PCIe accelerator cards) or on some ARM SoC with open source firmware (for standalone mining boards).

NetTecture

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Quote from: Sukrim on June 12, 2011, 08:08:19 AM

My issue with all of this is, that the hadware spec won't be Open Source, only the finished ("compiled") chips should be sold.

Sorry, but this approach creates a centralized entity again. If it's really so hard and expensive anyways to produce ASICs, you could open source the hardware plan anyways, as there won't be someone else to copy it who has not a few million bucks to play with.

I won't develop (or help developing) anything that in the end will only output a centralized miner chip that noone can audit (who says this design I implement doesn't use 10% of it's power to submit my private shares?) or improve. It is my believe that as much about Bitcoin as possible should be open source - this includes miners in software AND hardware!

Is this a delusion here?

Chip production is not something that scales down. Want open source - sure. Pay for tapeout yourself. I think you overlook three really critical poitns here:

* One, multiple such designs can coexist.
* Second, this is economy of scale. Startup costs for production are HIGH, so you neeed tp produce a LOT to make it financially viable. Get the design and be surprised by 50.000 USD costs just to get the tape out - not having product a chip, plus the factory then calling for a minimum run. Not having enough money? Go buy chips.
* Third, the chip can not sumit anything (10% private shares - nice joke), it still has to go through an open source DRIVER. hich sort of makes sure it gets properly used.

But really, anyone asking for not selling the chips is delusional - I think not a sinbgle miner here can seriously finance a fully production run for special chips sensibly.

I, personally, would hbe happy to buy special boards that contain q lot of lower wattage processing power.

Sukrim

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My issue with all of this is, that the hadware spec won't be Open Source, only the finished ("compiled") chips should be sold.

Sorry, but this approach creates a centralized entity again. If it's really so hard and expensive anyways to produce ASICs, you could open source the hardware plan anyways, as there won't be someone else to copy it who has not a few million bucks to play with.

I won't develop (or help developing) anything that in the end will only output a centralized miner chip that noone can audit (who says this design I implement doesn't use 10% of it's power to submit my private shares?) or improve. It is my believe that as much about Bitcoin as possible should be open source - this includes miners in software AND hardware!

kokjo

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You are WRONG!

seem interesting. Cheesy

k

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Just posting to follow this thread

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