Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

New Bitmain Antminer B7 96KHS ASIC Miner for Bytom (BTM)

6, Mar 2019

Bitmain has made available a new 96KHS ASIC miner for Bytom (BTM) called Antminer B7 as a successor of their Antminer B3 ASIC from about a year ago that was offering just 780 H/s mining hashrate with 360 Watts of power usage. After the release of the B3 ASIC last year the development of a much faster GPU miner for Bytom’s Tensority algorithm began and currently most recent GPUs are delivering quite good hashrates for BTM mining. The new Bitmain Antminer B7 ASIC is going to put out a more serious competition however for anyone interested in minig BTM.

The new Bitmain Antminer B7 ASIC is currently only available on the Chinese website of Bitmain and promises 96 KHS hashrate with just 528 Watts of power usage, so tough competition for GPUs in term of hashrate and power usage. The price of the new Antminer B7 ASIC miner is currently set at 9900 Chinese Yuan or a little less than $1500 USD, but ordering the device to Europe or US can easily bump the price to over 2K. When you look at the current low profit numbers however you may very quickly decide not to invest in these new ASIC miners however…

The most recent version of the fastest NBMiner 21.0 GPU miner for Bytom (BTM) is capable of delivering about 3.4 KHS for a single GTX 1070 Ti, 5 KHS for a single GTX 1080 Ti and 11.5 KHS for GTX 2080 GPUs according to the official information from the developer. This means that a 8x GTX 2080 GPUs mining rig would be needed in order to deliver hashrate similar to that of the Antminer B7, but it will end up significantly pricier and with higher power usage.

– You can visit the official Chinese website of Bitmain for more details on the new B7 ASIC miner…

Bitmain Has Announced New 7nm BM1397 ASIC chip for SHA256 Mining

18, Feb 2019

Bitmain has just announced its next generation 7nm ASIC chip called BM1397 that is apparently capable of great performance and energy efficiency for mining cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), that use the SHA256 algorithm for their Proof of Work (PoW). The new BM1397 ASIC chip requires lower power and can offer an energy consumption to computing ratio as low as 30J/TH or with other words almost 30 percent improvement in power efficiency compared to their previous 7nm chip BM1391 that is already found in the company’s latest SHA256 ASIC miners.

The new BM1397 ASIC chip is made using TSMC’s 7nm FinFET manufacturing process and it is expected to be featured in the upcoming Antminer models named the S17 and T17 that will be announced by Bitmain at a later date. There are no detailed specifications available for the moment, however ~30% better power efficiency could mean up to about 30% higher performance for the same power as the currently available AntMiner S15 and S17 ASICs that sue the first generation of 7nm chips form Bitmain. It is not all about performance however…

New Braiins OS Cobalt Release With Manual Fan Control Available

30, Jan 2019

The Braiins OS is an alternative opensource OS for Bitcoin ASIC miners and more specifically for Antminer S9 and DragonMint T1 with support for AsicBoost. The initial release was not that easy to install and use, but looked very promising, but in December last year the second major version named Braiins OS Cobalt was made available and it made things much easier for everyone to switch from the factory firmware. The initial Cobalt release however was missing a crucial feature as we have noted and that was manual fan control as by default the automatic control was keeping high operating temperatures and fans spinning at lower RPM. This has been fixed in the new second release along with some more useful features and improvements worth upgrading to the new release or switching from the stock firmware. If you want to read the full list of what is new in the latest Braiins OS Cobalt release.

In the latest version you have the option to use either Automatic Fan Control or set Fixed Fan Speed. In automatic mode you can set the desired temperature and the fan controller will try to keep as close as possible to that temperature by varying the fan speed. The fixed speed mode is set in percentage and the fans will operate at the set value regardless of the temperature, so you need to be careful with this mode, though setting at 100% target fan speed should be pretty safe. Do note that the operating temperature depends not only on the cooling fans of the miner, but also on the ambient air temperatures and other factors.

Another new interesting feature is the new frequency scaling mode that is essentially an overclocking multiplier allowing you to set an overclock by a constant factor for all of the miner chains at once over the overclock settings you may have individually set already. Overclocking is easier in the new release as you are able to lower the temperatures by manually controlling the fan speeds now thus getting more headroom for overclocking. When overclocking also make sure that not only the cooling can handle things, but also the power supply you are using is sufficient enough as well, especially if you start increasing the operating voltages as well and not only the frequencies.

– For more details about the new Braiins OS Cobalt release for S9 and T1 ASIC miners…


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