What hashrates do you guys have?
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf ^Thats making me even more exciting about that stuff. Where can you make such, or where can i learn more about the design of FPGAs. Did you somehow work in that field bevore so you already had the knowledge or did you learn it yourselv ?
I learned it all myself - I've been doing it on and off for about a year. @bitspill and I planned to have a contest to see who could make a better FPGA miner on a board we both have, but we never got around to it. I'm contacting him now to get it going. :3
It's a LOT different than software development, but I think, in a way, my years of experience in OS development (from scratch), and GPU development did help me a little. From both, I learned to study my platform and learn what it does well, and how it does it - then express my problem in operations that my target hardware does well. From GPU development, I got used to the idea of parallelism, but it's still a far cry from the level of parallelism in hardware.
There is no instruction pointer. In software, there's almost always some kind of ordering - even if multiple threads (or work-items in the case of AMD GPUs) are executing. First this instruction executes, then the next one does. In hardware, this is not the case. Everything happens at once unless you take specific measures to ensure its ordering. At first, to a software developer, this is confusing and scary. But once you get used to it, it can feel very freeing.
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@Wolf Haha that's a great idea. How much did it cost to make ethat FPGA since its acchieving halv the hashrate of my r9 280x. If it is then even lower costs then it would be awsome :D
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf Haha that's a great idea. How much did it cost to make ethat FPGA since its acchieving halv the hashrate of my r9 280x. If it is then even lower costs then it would be awsome :D
To answer this, it's important to understand the difference between development, and what you would use to scale hashrate. I paid for a general development board - which has a LOT of stuff that is not needed for hashing. It has VGA out, HDMI in/out, DisplayPort in/out, audio in/out jacks, Ethernet, several USB ports, 8 switches, some buttons, an FMC connector, a little OLED screen, 512MiB DDR3 RAM with a stock clock of 900Mhz, 32MiB of non-volatile QSPI flash... the list goes on. The reason for this is because it is a general development board, targeted at developers doing all sorts of projects. It retails at $1,300 USD, but I got mine on an academic discount for $600 USD.
Now, I plan to scale this kind of hashing, which means I am having a custom PCB made with very few of these things on it. I'll need the FPGA, of course, which the best deal I found on AliExpress (that wasn't shady) was a lot of 10 for $1,800 USD. The other things I'd need is a USB to serial converter chip, a mini-USB or micro-USB port, maybe a few buttons and switches, as well as some non-volatile QSPI flash to flash the FPGA upon power-on. This cuts price a LOT. Considering only the most expensive part, the FPGA, $1,800 for 10 of them means $180 USD for 500MH/s, which is a damned good deal. In order to make it even more worthwhile, I'm having the design made such that it supports several FPGAs per board. Additionally, as I improve my design and become more skilled, I should be able to get more hash out of them and lower my power consumption. This is on top of the fact that power consumption will go down (in terms of hash per watt) with a custom board, simply because I am not powering peripheral devices I do not need and will not use.
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@Wolf I can not describe how cool that sounds to be honest :D. And if this would rly be 500+ mh/s for about 180 wit that low power consumption , then it would be awsome. I can imagine this thing isnt nearly as loud as an GPU so you could basically have them in your bedroom or wherever you want them. So to round things up you basically only did software stuff to get it mining like this or did you also do some hardware things (i dont quite know what you meant with reconfigurable ASIC).
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf I can not describe how cool that sounds to be honest :D. And if this would rly be 500+ mh/s for about 180 wit that low power consumption , then it would be awsome. I can imagine this thing isnt nearly as loud as an GPU so you could basically have them in your bedroom or wherever you want them. So to round things up you basically only did software stuff to get it mining like this or did you also do some hardware things (i dont quite know what you meant with reconfigurable ASIC).
To be perfectly honest, it would be a bit more - just a quick google for prices shows the QSPI flash I'm looking at would be $3.50 or so per - but I'd probably need only one per board - and probably only a few dollars for the USB to serial chip. The real cost besides the FPGA would be the PCB design - but this only needs to be done once. Then you can have as many boards manufactured and assembled as you like.
It depends on what you mean by "software." I am designing circuits - the same design could be used to manufacture an ASIC, as I said. Since I'm currently using a development board, I'm not soldering anything right now, if that's what you mean. I have a small heatsink and fan on my XC7K325T that is currently mining Sia, but you can barely hear it. The best part is, I can flash it with any circuit design I can make that will fit on the chip - I've also used it to mine XVC, for example. I have two other FPGAs mining XVC right now, in fact.
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@Wolf oh, I somehow imagined something completely else at first. So how does that thing look like is there any picture I could see. At this point im pretty sure that i personally can't make something like that but it sounds interesting and wort learning about anyways. And what do you use to design the circuts adn what do they consist of (in easy words if you dont wana tell to much :D )
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf oh, I somehow imagined something completely else at first. So how does that thing look like is there any picture I could see. At this point im pretty sure that i personally can't make something like that but it sounds interesting and wort learning about anyways. And what do you use to design the circuts adn what do they consist of (in easy words if you dont wana tell to much :D )
As far as I know, there are two main HDLs (hardware design languages) which are VHDL and Verilog. I use Verilog, myself. If you like, I can show you how addition is done on binary numbers by paw (yes, there is a '+' operator that will let the synthesizer do it for you, but it's always good to understand the basics and how things really happen.)
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@Wolf hmm is this something like bitwise operators which i learned about when trying out some python. And What is the reason that you bring up addition now (or am i just too stupid to understand that now ? ) im a little confused. :D
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf hmm is this something like bitwise operators which i learned about when trying out some python. And What is the reason that you bring up addition now (or am i just too stupid to understand that now ? ) im a little confused. :D
Since all you have in hardware is gates, yes, that's how it happens - bitwise operators. I bring up addition for two reasons - doing it with only bitwise ops is harder than one may think, and two, Blake2B (Sia's PoW) relies pretty heavily on them - it's actually the most complex operation in it, hardware-wise.
You wanted to see an example of hardware development in HDL, so I thought it would be fitting.
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@Wolf alright ill look more into that kinda stuff of how it works and understanding how the elgorythm of sia works in general. As of now im not even aware of how any of those algorythms work, why they pay solved block and why it needs to be mined in the first place xD
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf alright ill look more into that kinda stuff of how it works and understanding how the elgorythm of sia works in general. As of now im not even aware of how any of those algorythms work, why they pay solved block and why it needs to be mined in the first place xD
I was offering to describe addition in this thread, I meant - if you wanted. I can also go in-depth on mining and how that works, too.
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I've just finished my modifications to sgminer - a lot of people have been wanting a pool version of my private miner.
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@Wolf said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf alright ill look more into that kinda stuff of how it works and understanding how the elgorythm of sia works in general. As of now im not even aware of how any of those algorythms work, why they pay solved block and why it needs to be mined in the first place xD
I was offering to describe addition in this thread, I meant - if you wanted. I can also go in-depth on mining and how that works, too.
Both woul be realy interesting if you dont mind explaining to me :D
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf alright ill look more into that kinda stuff of how it works and understanding how the elgorythm of sia works in general. As of now im not even aware of how any of those algorythms work, why they pay solved block and why it needs to be mined in the first place xD
I was offering to describe addition in this thread, I meant - if you wanted. I can also go in-depth on mining and how that works, too.
Both woul be realy interesting if you dont mind explaining to me :D
Are you in the Sia Slack? Might be easier there.
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@Wolf not atm i can join in about 10 mins when i arrive at home
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@Wolf the invite is down for me so i can't join
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@seitrox said in What hashrates do you guys have?:
@Wolf the invite is down for me so i can't join
Well, it's 2AM here, but let me know when you can join - I'll ask Taek to look into that. It'll be easier to discuss in a more interactive way.
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@Wolf its 9 am here and i gotta work at 10 am too so yeah once i can acces the slack ima let you know ^^