Yes, a 90-day warranty raises a LOT of concerns.  Has Bittware done stress testing and has some reason to believe the failure rate ramps up after that timeframe?  I could understand a 90-day warranty on support issues with a 1-year hardware warranty.  

I was in the process of arranging my finances to purchase a few cards, but if the manufacturer has that little confidence in their product, they're sending me a message I can't ignore.  Even the Chinese manufacturers (with their notorious quality) give 180-day warranties.

Relying on these expensive card with limited supply is kind of semi failed project, these cards are great for developer but for the average Joe they are useless without proper bitstreams what will guarantee us that bitstreams will be posted over the time for these cards it not like every Hoe and Joe can program them.

If i was a FPGA developer i will target lower end FPGAs like sub $1k,  that will make it more affordable to the public, there are offerings from Altera/Intel thats very interesting for mining research like hardware PCIe controller, memory controller, interface for ethernet already build in and thats like $500-$600 FPGA price range, coupled with QDR memory, ideal miner for Monero(for monero algo we dont need much QDR scratchpad is only 2Megs for now) it doesnt mater it will be slow the key thing is how effective is compared to GPUs if the power consumptions is magnitude lower compared to GPUs well it deserves the affords.

Also we need open hardware , PCB and gerber files to be published so anyone can order the boards and assemble themselves or order assembling to 3rd party. Ordering PCBs to the chinese is dirty cheap these days.

where is the fpga miner... if u buy fpga its just fpga... where is the custom logic for various coins where are the Files ?

is someone selling this FPGA mining rig plug&play?
or is there an EU location where can I buy all stuff & count on software support?

No that makes no sense. 481.25k/430k = 12% better only LOL.
If u or someone can make a machine that mines ETH 5 times more efficient than a GPU can, u would sell alot of it. It wont need to be an FPGA.

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Concept doesnt work
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Conceptually, u are paying more for buying it piecemeal wise and paying more for a machine that has algo switching capability.
Your competitor gets bulk discount by buying alot at once... AND ... is paying for a cheaper machine, although it can do 1 algo at a time.
Your competitor will always go after the major algo (major coin), pushing u out of that coin/algo and forcing u to mine the smaller coins.

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Rough Comparison:
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And while the E3 does 180mh for 800watts which is comparable to some GPUs, bitmain can sell it for as little as 800 USD if they want to. Thats the price they sold on first batch. To do 180mh, u will need to spend about 2500 USD on a rig. The asic can be 3 times cheaper

For 300watts, u can get 10,000 sol on asic or for gpu, u get say 1,100 sol? Thats 9 times more efficient and the asic is also far cheaper on a per sol basis.


If u consider the gap between using gpu to mine bitcoin/litecoin, vs asics, the gap is even bigger.
Doing it 12% better on FPGA isnt a game-changer at all.

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Why FPGA cant win
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There is a limited amount of money that can be made from mining.
Lets say, for illustration, there are 100k of coins released for miners to earn every 10 mins

In the past, 10% of all coins are mined by ASICS and 90% by GPUs or FPGAs (aka switchers)
Time passes and asics mine 30% and then 50% and then 70% of all total mined coins.

Thus, as  time pass, the switchers (GPUs and FPGAs), now mine only the remaining 70% and then 50% and now 30% of coins.
Hence, as time passes, there will be more and more switchers sharing a smaller and smaller percentage of the mining PIE. The switchers mining profits will just decrease and decrease as the total % of all coins they mine decrease


And if a new major coin appears, the FPGA wont mine it long before an asic takes over. The remaining switchers will be sharing a smaller and smaller pool of coins. Thus, they will earn less and less as the remaining pool of coins have their difficulties skyrocket. Dont be surprised if GPUs get a 5-10% share of coins in future.

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Speed of Asics being developed
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I mean just look at this year. It is only early May and we have a decred, sia, eth, cryptonight and now zcash asic. Thats 5 major algo and at least 5 major coins being taken down by asics. It is like one new algo takes down one major coin a month. Furthermore there might be other asics algo already made, just not released yet. And lets face it, a new major alt coin appears, it will be taken down by asics soon.


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Difficulty wave coming
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Ok, so in June 2018, the E3s will be shipped. ETH difficulty will skyrocket and alot of GPUs will move from ETH to other coins. Expect other coins difficulty to increase. The good news is that E3 price was increased from 800 to 2,100 usd. This means slighty lesser E3 purchased and lesser difficulty increase compared to if it were 800 USD. Do note that E3 price may go down again in future down which leads to more E3 purchases and higher difficulty. The antminer L3+ went down in price and it lead to a massive litecoin difficulty increase. If the E3 goes down in price, it is gonna take down GPU/FPGA mining even more. Remember, it can be priced 3 times lower than a gpu rig. A far stronger E3 may appear as well. U are pretty much at the whim of bitmain here.

ETH is actually the major gpu coin. If E3 price down to 800 USD again, it is goodbye to all GPU/FPGA.

The Z9 mini will take down zec/btc-gold gpu mining, period. SIA and Decred are asic owned.


Thus, I just dont see how it will work. By right, it was over for gpu when E3 appeared since eth is the major gpu coin. Does anyone know how much % of GPU mining is ETH. Is it over 50%?

Asics have clearly won the war. They may very well push GPUs to have 5-10% of total coins being mined in future.
I believe u are letting your feelings cloud your judgement. Anyways, good luck to u buddy.



Just my 2 cents

I edited previous post to explain more. Do read the conceptual part.


There are too few developers that will fork just to avoid asics lol. The only major that did that is monero. That is why asics which used to command say 10% of all mining, now command maybe 70-80%? Why do u think GPUs keep losing market share to Asics?


And it seems u didnt realize that as it is, once the antminer E3 and and antminer Z9 hit the market later, it is going to drive eth and zec/btc-gold,etc difficulty up so high that alot of GPUs will switch to other coins. If the antminer E3 goes down in price, difficulty of ETH will skyrocket.


The key lies in antminer E3 price. ETH is too major a coin. They may just decide to cash in later with lower E3 prices.


==============================
What it is already CHECKMATE FOR GPU/FPGA
==============================
U just dont realize it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wufiq/ethereum_is_64_of_all_gpu_mining_by_power_09gw_of/
According to this thread, ETH is 64% of all GPU mining power. I always thought it was above 50%.

That being said, the antminer E3 is actually checkmate for GPU already. If they just push it down to 800 USD again. Sales of E3 will skyrocket leading to ETH difficulty skyrocket. GPUs will move out of ETH to other coins. Difficulty of other coins will rise too. GPUs will be wiped out and probably sold en mass cheap on ebay. U see, they can manufacture it at too cheaply for gpus to compete.

U are actually not competing with your asic competitor with your FPGA. U are at their mercy. I hope u realize this. I am talking about existing asics and not them having to come up with a stronger one yet.


FPGA can only win if lets say over 50% of GPU mining power is shared among say 100 crypto coins. Ahhh and then, u would wanna use FPGA because it is too difficult to create 100 different asics to mine 100 different coins.
However, that isnt the case in crypto world. Eth holds 64% lol and a few major coins hold most of the other %. That is why crypto manufacturers mostly build Asics. They arent stupid. With 5 asics appearing so far this year to take down 5 gpu coins, it seems they can create a new asic every 30 days now. Thus, it is possible that 90+% of future coins are asic coins.


Now, do wise up and stop pointing that small handgun at the tanks and bazookas. U aint gonna win. Oh and u are welcome buddy

P.S> U may even wanna consider shorting nvdia and amd stock in july-august before earnings lol. The downdraft should show up by then.


Just my 2 cents.

All premised on - "E3 sold cheaply"?

Last time Bitmain increased the price from 800 to 2000 odd. Without even delivering a single one! Bitmain is not going to sell you their money making machine cheap...

@Sandal_Hat

Don’t pretend the example I gave makes no financial sense; it would be like arguing with someone that 2 is not less than 3, it’s pointless.

Now, I understand what you are saying but you are also conflating the issues. A reconfigurable system that costs less, and consumes 5x less space and energy; but has comparable hash rates for a given algorithm is preferred for mining, and that’s the issue. If such a system exits, it would push out the less efficient system.

As an aside, I know that dollar for dollar in the long run for mining, FPGAs lose to GPUs, and GPUs lose to ASICs, but it doesn't happen overnight

Your discussions omit three important parameters:

1) coin price increases (crowds out diff increases)
2) emergence of new coins & algos (reduces asic dominance)
3) the willingness of large coins to fork to fight asics (reduces asic dominance)

These speak against loss of profitability and arguments against reprogrammable fpgas as well.

Why do you think it would take a month to re-program FPGA to a new fork? I guess it takes max few days after the code for GPU is released as the fork changes are quite small, so the only few lines of code is changed, but enough so that it breaks already manufactured custom ASICs.
It can take few months to design new custom algo for FPGA, but not to make few changes due to fork.