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Genesis Mining Innosilicon A2 Scrypt Mining Farm
8, Dec 2014
One of the things that miners are most concerned about when talking about cloud mining services is the fear that they may be a Ponzi scheme and that fear is fueled by the fact that many of these services are not very open and prefer to remain highly anonymous. Not all of the cloud mining services are like that however, there are some that want to be more open and not remain anonymous in order to make it clear to their users that they are serious and reliable. One such service is Genesis Mining, a service that was started just a few months ago, but has been developing constantly and is offering some unique and interesting new features in the industry.
A few days ago we have covered one of the latest features, the addition of Unobtanium (UNO) as a SHA-256 coin that you can choose to mine with Bitcoin cloud hashrate that you purchase. We have also covered the fact that the service has been out of stock of Scrypt cloud mining hashrate along with some concerns regarding ZeusMiner, one of the Scrypt hardware suppliers for the service. Genesis Mining however does not rely only on Zeus, who have announced that they are not going to be making new hardware a while ago, they do have other hardware suppliers like Innosilicon. As a proof we got a photo of Genesis Mining Scrypt mining farm of located in Iceland that is populated with a lot of Innoslicon A2 Terminator-based Scrypt ASIC miners and the company’s CTO in front of the mining hardware.
– For more information about the currently available services from Genesis Mining…
With September closing up and many new Scrypt ASIC manufacturers getting ready to start shipping their mining hardware things are heating up with the currently available miners and in order to keep the users interest we need to see new prices. One of the most significant things about the Innosilicon A2 miners, a thing we have noted in our reviews of their products, is that they are pretty expensive or actually were. We know that the company is using 28 nm technology for their chips and thus achieves higher performance with lower power consumption, but up until recently the price of the hardware did not justify the difference in power usage compared to other alternatives available with higher power usage. The good news is that apparently Innosilicon has finally decided to lower the prices by also making available new miners, making them a more attractive option and finally able to compete with ZeusMiner for example price wise for the same or similar hashrate while still offering lower power usage.
The new A2 MINI Terminator is available for $789 USD and offers 35 MHS Scrypt hashrate with a power consumption of about 350W. Unlike the old A2 Mini miner however the new model does not come with built-in power supply, though there is still a Raspberry Pi controller built-in into the miner, so you need to also buy a PSU for this one. The other new miner is the A2 MEGA Terminator currently available for $2499 USD. This miner offers 110 MHS Scrypt hashrate with less than 1100W power usage as the device comes with built in 1100W power supply and a RPi controller like the A2BOX miner that we have already reviewed. With the new A2 miners the price per 1 MHS comes at about $23 USD for a complete solution ready to be used out of the box (adding a PSU for the Mini miner as well). So if you are currently considering making an investment in Scrypt ASIC hardware that is currently available you might want to take a look at the new Innosilicon A2 miners.
Innosilicon A2 Terminator Scrypt ASIC RPi OC Mod
15, Aug 2014
Innosilicon still has not made any release of the source code of their cgminer fork with support for the A2 Scrypt ASIC chips, what you get with their A2 Terminator Scrypt ASIC devices is a Raspberry Pi with a preloaded cgminer and simple web interface to control the device. The standard web interface however is a bit limited in the supported operating frequencies – 1000 and 1200 MHz. The recompiled cgminer does allow for a few more operating frequencies to be used, however they are not selectable by default through the web interface of the miner. Some time ago there was a modified image released by a user called Emdje that supposedly allowed more overclock options. However it has turned out that it was not really functional as even though you could select operating frequency at steps of 5 MHz the cgminer did not accept these values and instead defaulted to some of the supported frequencies.
Back when we first had the chance to do a remote test of a A2BOX Scrypt ASIC miner we have discovered that the only supported operating frequencies by the Innosilicon A2 Terminator Scrypt ASIC miners are: 1000, 1080, 1100, 1200, 1280, 1300 and 1400 MHz. This is why we have made a modification to the standard RPi image that ships with the A2 miners, so that you can quickly and easily add the supported frequencies to be selectable from the web interface of the miner. This should allow you to squeeze some more extra performance from your device, regardless if it is the smaller 2 module or the large 6 module ASIC model, as our tests have shown that most of the miners should be able to work pretty well at up to 1280-1300 MHz up from the maximum of 1200 MHz that you have by default. Below you can download the modification we have prepared along with the instructions on how to update your miner, so that you get the extra OC options available.
How to login to your miner via SSH/SFTP using putty/WinSCP:
– username: pi
– password: innosilicon
Where to find the miner and web interface:
/var/www
Replace the index.php file with the following modification:
– modified index.php
All that is left is to refresh the webpage with the miner interface and you should see the new options for operating frequencies available in the dropdown boxes for the A2 modules. For the smaller miners you need to select just the first two frequencies as you can see on the image above, for the large A2 miners you need to set all of the six frequencies. Do note that each of the modules can operate at a different frequency, so experiment and set the best frequency for each one that gives the lowest HW error rate and optimum performance.