Something about this chip gives me the feeling that all mining will eventually go the way of underclocked ASICS. Its a lot less GH but its so much lower J/G.
Chips are not much more than the cost of sand if you own the manufacturing and intellectual property.. clearly a growth path to sell miners with more and more chips per unit with low power requirements one the tech is proven to be stable to the community I would think. It seems like it would be easy to double the hashing output with similar cooling and power consumption when the timing is right for bitmain to do so.
I'm not an EE genius.. but I don't understand why they wouldnt eventually just use different DC-DC modules internally to provide 9v or 12v w/ standard PSU. Possibly saving that for the next miner with the BM1384? I also don't fully understand the string vs chain discussions going on.. I guess stringing the chips make other chips dependant on one another for hashing output.. My mind draws analogies to a string of christmas lights where the rest go out when a bulb blows, or running a bunch of hard drives in raid 0 (other drives in the array have useless data with the missing member). Of course I haven't scoured the discussions on these matters, and have only gleaned over the facts... but there sure is a lot of crazy heated discussion going on. Anyone have any link backs to messages in this thread or other threads which may help to learn me up. When I get a minute I'll try to read over the BM1384 whitepaper, I assume it might be the source of a lot of this conjecture.
So far MOST of the bitmain stuff I have purchased has been pretty on point and meets the specs which they claim their miners should meet*, and have publicly and quickly adjusted those specs when they were not accurate.. Ie. Antminer S3 launch 480GH/s -> 441GH/s and even gave refunds for the hashing difference if you purchased when they claimed it would be 480GH/s
(*Its important to note that honesty is good business, but bitmain isn't in the business of charity, you would be lucky to mine back the BTC you spend buying any miner.. so do this for the fun of it.. Don't buy miners to profit.. companies which make miners certainly aren't selling them so you can make a profit.. you WON'T make a profit mining.. Expect 60% of your BTC to come back that you spend AFTER you pay the electric bill. the shrewd miners who do still mine do it for the love of mining and they will sell their equip to recoup and break even, and buy back in on the next most efficient equipment.. even though they know even that isnt the sane investment to make.. The smartest miners probably rebuy their BTC so they are spending fiat not crypto, so at the end of the day they can see some justifiable profit.. even though buying BTC would have been much smarter.. but not nearly as tangible, or fun.)
As far as spondoolies goes. I love my Sp20's.... great miners. However the Spondoolie guys clearly overstated its hashing power at 1.7TH. Honest marketing here would have been 1.333TH/s @ .55J/Gh at the wall... with overclocking to 1.55TH/s (1.7TH/s being possible but not guaranteed).. This is the real specs of the Sp20 miner... And what about those refunds they said they would be sending for slipped delivery dates.. I never got one? Did anyone?
Anyway.. I can understand concerns with chip failures.. they happen.. and if it takes out a whole string permanantly if a chip dies permanantly.. thats bad bad bad.. but so far every other antminer I have owned (well over 30 so far) have had exceedingly resilient asics... if one did overheat it has always come back after a reboot if it dropped off because of an overclock, and always behaved well when it was clocked at the advertised frequencies... When deployed sanely the built in safeties seem to do their job.. and allow an adjustment to consistently stable operation.
I'm just sharing some thoughts.
Rich
