Topic: Will fund ASIC board for mining community. Need Hardware devs. - page 5. (Read 41463 times)

This can't be true if we manage to get >100MHz even on FPGAs. 8MHz sounds like the algorithm isn't pipelined at all, and calculates a hash in a single clock cycle, which is a waste, as latency doesn't matter here. What matters is throughput, and if you can get more than 20 times the throughput with just a couple of additional flipflops, you shouldn't bother about 128 clocks of latency.

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.  Mining difficulty is such that the idea of an individual building a dedicated miner is borderline lunacy - the btc made by mining is pretty much exactly equal to the electricity cost of doing so.

So who mines, given that mining is necessary for the integrity of the system?  The answer - everybody.  Your btc wallet is a keychain usb stick with a small btc client that mines whenever powered and internet connected.  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.

And who pays for the portable btc wallet/miner hardware/development?  The pool owners, that's who.  Amazon gives you a free btc wallet with every purchase.  Google give you one free if you sign up for adwords.  Buy a new Toyota and it comes with a btc wallet (and a USB plug to stick it in your car, so you can pay for fuel with btc at the pump).  And the pool owners in general keep the proceeds of mining (we're probably talking transaction fee only by this stage).  Or maybe they give you a discount on your next purchase, or something like a frequent flyer system.

Anyway, that's one vision of a possible future with btc.  But one that I think is plausible if btc "takes off" and lives up to its potential.

He can't get over due to hazards . The propagation delay will be way too big to get any higher frequency.

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.

I think an open source hardware design is a great idea. The FPGA design work that is going on is just awesome. Provides a level playing field for anyone who wants to get in to the custom hardware game. At the end of the day, the innovation should not be in mining, but in the software and services to make Bitcoin more readily accessible and integrated with other ecommerce systems.

Commercial bitcoin mining solutions? I didn't know there was a solution built specifically for bitcoin mining already instead of an adaptation of generally available commerical products built for differing reasons. Please enlighten us..

EDIT: I misread the initial quote however I'll leave my reply as is because the general point is the same, nothing has been purpose built that is generally available to the community, in that sense it could be done.

I have a background in hardware driven SHA-* hashing for different reasons and there is a fair amount of good research available online as well as good performance analysis of different approaches, should be an interesting project if the details are released to the community (vs. Art's close hold)

bookmarked

Good choice given the nature of the thread thus far, I wish you the best with this and think you may yield some good results depending on the firm you hired.

I think you might be assuming too much about his level of experience and knowledge on the matter, lets not rush to conclusions.

I'll defiantly be watching this thread, but in a way it would be kind of a shame to see mining move away from the GPU and onto dedicated hardware, it would mean the end of the garage miner.  It seems like the people who would be most interested in buying these would be small companies and start ups, only the die-hard miners would buy hardware that could only be used for mining bitcoins, even if they were cheaper than GPUs.

But on the other hand, I wouldn't want to see this type of thing only be available to a select few either. I'm kind of torn, but honestly I would probably buy one.  

I never said I had not experience. In fact, I said I am a physicist with 1 year of masters in electrical engineering. I said I understand, transistor, gate logic and most if the solid state physics stuff related to electronics, since thats what I did for a few years at the university. I said, I had no experience design on a massive scale using current software and compiling the data to the TSMC format. Thats a lot different than no experience or no knowledge of the issue. The reason I know the price per units is because I have a quote from TSMC.

Anyways, I have hired a firm to help out with the design from start to finish. So things will go smoothly now.

The performance numbers sound reasonable. I have no idea why he only gets 8MHz, but this sounds like it can be improved. For a full pipeline you need roughly 100K flipflops plus all the logic. 100 times that would be 10M flipflops plus logic, which would be a rather big ASIC, but it's certainly possibly.

I had a co-worker try an Altera HardCopy synthesis and that one ended up with 20 pipelines running at >200MHz each, yielding >4GH/s per chip.

I don't trust these cost estimates at all though. The ASIC price estimate might be sensible for >10000 volumes, but the board, host interface and assembly cost estimated at $30 seems to be impossible. The VRM alone will cost that much.

I have developed in Xilinx ISE and from my experience that's way off. How many gates do you have? To have 1 hash/clock it must be insanely big, and you have to multiply it by 1000 (as you said). Hoe did you guess the production cost?

Even without knowing anything about algorithms Bitcoins and other stuff, the fact is: Commercial solutions are slower and more expensive, how a person with no experience make something better, faster and cheaper?

Hello, care to elaborate a little more?

Maybe, maybe not.  Those who wanted to mine on GPU's didn't think to highly of the claims of a single ATI 5830 getting 100 times the hash rate that a high end cpu could get either.  I'm going to reserve judgement until I see some physical hardware.

Absolutely impossible.

I apologize for locking this thread by accident. It is now unlocked.

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...)

Anyways, as long as I just read about "I designed this and that and it does xxx MH/s" and noone releases even an FPGA implementation of that, I personally don't really trust it.
Doing all of Bitcoins math in just 1 clock cycle for example takes quite a lot of gates, hm?

I've only seen ahtremblay talk about PCB, i.e. circuit boards. Frankly, fitting these on pc slot-in cards would be daft. External units connected by usb, or preferrably ethernet is the only way to go..

spend up to millions of dollars to fit one asic chip on a usb stick (and get limited hashing and zero scaling ability)  vs. build a PCIe card or array that can fit tons of chips and scale  hugely)?  

I would go with the latter.

Screw PCIe ASIC miners, what we really need (and will eventually get, if bitcoin doesn't tank) is a USB miner.  Put your wallet on the USB miner, plug it in to a computer and it starts hashing automatically. 

If I had the time, money or expertise I'd be working on something like this.  Unfortunately I have none of the above - I'm merely an ideas man.