No it won't be 22 billion. But 4-5 billion by April is very possible. Just wait till hardware is marked down which will cause more irrational buying. These ASIC chips and boards probably cost $50 each. ASIC manufacturers will adjust accordingly so they can continue to sell equipment. The ball is in their court.
Or not. The DC regulators on the board cost more than that.
Can ASIC prices come down? Yes but even with free ASICs the balance of the system is still going to have some cost and those costs are unlikely to get massively reduced over time. An x00 watt PSU is going to have a non zero cost. PCB creation and assembly, DC regulators, even mundane things like fans, heatsinks, cables, and cases. There is no Moore's law or massive markup on these components. With free ASICs you still wouldn't have $50 boards.
The best "kits" i have seen thus far to make costs low is Bitfury chips with c-scape design.
Leave's the cost of the incidentals up the the purchaser rather than the manufacturer/seller
For bitfury the original first batch of chips cost was priced at $5 a GH. At least according to Tytus's picostock post ...
Summary:
Strong aspects:
- low investment costs: only $5 1GH/s (4 times cheaper than competing products)
- low maintenance costs due to low power dissipation of the chip: approximately 0.2-0.3 Watt 1GH/s (4-20 time better than competition)
- 4 year manufacturer warranty
Weak aspects:
- chip not tested yet, tape out in 1 month (full mask, engineering run), final simulation results will be posted in 2 weeks
- deployment of 100TH-mine in July 2013
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/140366.msg1494509#msg1494509Well the ASIC chips themselves can be much much cheaper than $5/GH especially a design with high die efficiency (GH/mm2), sub $1 is certainly possible. Still the point is that while raw chip prices will fall rapidly from $50 per GH/s down to $1 per GH/s the balance of the system won't fall as rapidly.
Lets just look at a generic large ASIC chip design. Say 150 GH/s per chip at 100W (@ chip) with 4 modules per rig. If the chip is running at 0.8V nominal you are looking at 125A of DC regulators. The prebuilt modules used by KNC are about $0.50 per A in bulk. Lets say someone went with a custom design at half that cost. 125A @ $0.10 per A = $12.50 per board or 8.3 cent per GH.
If you use an off the shelf CPU cooler heatsink & fan assembly you are looking at $20 ea for something which can handle 150W+. Throw in another 4 case fans at $7 ea and cooling is $108 per system or $0.18 per GH.
The rest of the board is relatively cheap. Rather than go through ever component lets just budget $10 for all connectors, caps, resistors, fan headers, etc. KNC boards are ~36 sq inches. PCB production in small batches tends to be $0.20 per sq in. We are looking at $7 for production. Assembly and testing is going to vary by the number and type of components but even in volume on simple boards is going to be a couple bucks. As a guesstimate lets say another $3. So we are looking at on the order of $0.07 ea for balance of components and production/assembly.
A good quality and efficiency ATX PSU is going to be on the order of $0.16 per W. If we assume each of 4 chips use 100W ea, 11W per board is lost in conversion, and then 8 fans (4 heatsink + 4 host) use another 6W each, the host is likely light at 10W max. Total wattage is something like 500W. Power ends up being $0.14 per GH.
You probably need some sort of data and power connector. Lets say $5 ea or $0.07 per GH/s. Finally you will need some host. BBB is a good option cheap and yet relatively powerful and ease to develop for. Now KNC uses a seperate expensive daughterboard with FPGA "manager" but that likely isn't necessary. It may be possible to do it with just a BBB (or rPi) to save cost. Say $50 per system or $0.08 per GH.
So even if magically a pile of free chips landed in your lap with no labor costs, no customer service, no profit, and no yield losses at a min we are looking at.
DC regulators = $0.08 per GH
Balance of components = $0.07 per GH
PCB production & assembly = $0.07 per GH
Cooling = $0.18 per GH
Power = $0.14 per GH
Cables = $0.07 per GH
Host = $0.08 per GH
Total (at least) = ~$0.70 per GH.
Nobody is going to be selling 150 GH/s boards for $50. As the margins on chips decline the "balance of the system" will act like a drag on marginal cost. Also the prices above are rather optimistic. More like what could be done instead of what is being done. If you need water cooling, or want rackmount case your cost will be higher. It also assumes a relatively efficient chip, lower efficiency means more power and cooling related costs. Still I think chips can break $1 GH/s and the bulk of the system cost being another $0.70 to $1.00. Even with labor cost and a small profit margin we "could" be seeing miners at around $2 per GH in 2014 but those dreaming of the day when $0.25 per GH rigs are right around the corner will be waiting a while.
