
Open Hardware Bitcoin Miner - GeorgeHahn
https://github.com/GeorgeHahn/Avalon
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kken
This is not really open. Where are the ASIC design files?

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sliverstorm
The GitHub says open _board_. I gather it's someone unrelated to the company
that makes the ASICs, that would like to buy discrete chips rather than a
whole package from Avalon.

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sciguy77
I suspect this is a clever way to sell more Avalon chips (they're over $100
each if memory serves).

I remember reading that the chip was designed by a kid at NYU-Poly. How is a
college student able to design and manufacture such an awesome chip?

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wsxcde
Isn't it just a hardware implementation of SHA256? Shouldn't it be very
straightforward? I fully expect that the undergrads in the logic design class
I'm TA'ing will be able to do it. It's really not very much harder than
writing a program that computes SHA256.

A really really good implementation is probably harder but I think the
intersection of engineers with the required design skills, access to the
design tools, access to foundries and people interested is bitcoin is minimal.

~~~
kken
If you are a TA, why not assign this as a lab assignment? Some group could
come up with an optimized approach. Could be fun to distrub the ASIC mining
market a little.

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wsxcde
It's something I was just thinking about as I was writing the comment but I
didn't like the idea too much. The course now only has time for two serious
projects: one is a game and another is a a little CPU. I think they're the
right combination of fun and pedagogically useful.

In terms of what students would learn from this project: it would be some
fairly straightforward sequencing and buffering logic and the weird
combinational munging that hash algorithms tend to do. I think there's more to
be learnt by building the little CPU. And we have quite a few sophomores who
may not appreciate what a cryptographic hash function is and why we might be
interested in building a hardware accelerator for it. We could possible do
some extra sessions, introduce them to hash functions, motivate hardware
accelerators and so on but it seems like it's not worth the trouble.

I think this assignment would be more suitable for a crypto/security course in
an EE department.

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tcas
Pretty cool, but I think the PCB design will need a bit more work before it
can be assembly house produced. There seems to be a lot of pointless via in
pads that are not plated over (plated over costs $). From most assembly houses
I've dealt with this is a big no-no (usually they'll still try, but expect
tombstoning and other bad things as solder is sucked through the via). Same
thing with the QFN/P parts.

If I had a copy of OrCad I'd love to check out the actual schematic/layout,
the Upverter doesn't seem to be updated.

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GeorgeHahn
I agree. The via in pads was done more as an experiment to see what would
happen - I'd never tried it before. They lower the inductance on the ground
path, but it's not a huge deal. They'll be relocated in a future iteration.
The QFNs have more vias than they need.

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nullc
This is a similar commercial design, currently available, using the bitfury
chips: [http://eligius.st/~gateway/products/hashbuster-
micro](http://eligius.st/~gateway/products/hashbuster-micro)

Unfortunately the tremendous demand for Bitcoin mining hardware means that
although there are several chip vendors now the market is not very
competitively priced— the chips are selling a huge multiples of their marginal
cost.

~~~
kanzure

        > Unfortunately the tremendous demand for Bitcoin mining hardware means
        > that although there are several chip vendors now the market is
        > not very competitively priced
    

Doesn't this just increase incentive to sell this hardware yourself and price
it lower? There's no way that this demand has already saturated all the pcb
shops and asic fabs or already eaten away the margins..

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ck2
Very impressive.

Also very necessary once all those 600 Ghash/sec miners come online in the
next 30-60 days. The difficulty will go through the roof.

I wonder what it costs to build a 10 chip board. Single chip 2.5Mhash/sec
bitfury chip board originally cost $100

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sliverstorm
Aside from the ASICs themselves? Cheap, if he can get a large board run
together. The real questions are, how much for the ASICs, and are you capable
of mounting BGA.

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sciguy77
Looks like 500 for 6 BTC. Like $14. I wonder if anyone would want to put
together a batch order?

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ck2
Those are the old 55nm chips. There are 28nm chips now.

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mrb
Avalon gen1 is 110nm. The (new) Avalon gen2 is 55nm.

KnCMiner is the only competitor who has 28nm chips, but their chips are merely
1000 Mhash/Joule, which is a power efficiency pretty close to Avalon gen2: 730
Mhash/Joule.

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Zoomla
Can you use an ASIC miner for Litecoin mining?

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bmelton
Currently, no.

However, Alpha Technologies has announced[1] an ASIC targeting scrypt (or at
least Litecoin) in development.

[1] -
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=341939.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=341939.0)

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DennisP
Seems like that'd be hard to do effectively, since the whole point of scrypt
is to put more of the burden on memory. It precomputes a lot of data that it
reuses, and it's faster to retrieve from ram than to recompute it, even with
specialized hardware.

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source99
From reading over the press release it looks like they intend to build an ASIC
that is only as powerful as a high end GPU but instead of needing the full
$350 video card you will only need the $25 ASIC. Then you put 14 ASICs on a
single board and get 14X the power at the same cost. Though I'm sure the
company will charge 10X the price of the video card. Ideally there is some
real power savings in the ASIC.

