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New Materia1 Decred (DCR) ASIC Miners in the Works
17, Nov 2017
It seems that there is a second company working on a Decred (DCR) ASIC miner, so it will not only be the recently announced Obelisk DCR1 apparently. There are two models announced for the moment from DCRasic – Materia 1 supposedly capable of offering 400 GHS (Blake-256) with 275 Watts of power and priced at $1099 and Materia1-TURBO to offer 3 THS (Blake-256) with 2.1 kW of power usage and a hefty price tag of $7500. Materia1 ASICs are still not available for order as their development is supposedly currently ongoing, but the pre-sale should start by the end of this month according to the available information. The delivery of the final product will most likely not be earlier than 6 months from the start of the sale, if the project is successfully funded and sometime in 2018 we might end up with multiple Decred (DCR) ASIC miner options.
We’ve had some concerns after the recent announcement of the Obelisk and so we do here, so while are going to keep an eye on the project with interest we advice a lot of caution should you decide to invest in any of the two options at the moment. Both companies haven’t delivered any ASIC miners so far and their projects are apparently both still in development and the risk that they may not deliver is real. For the moment both projects seem like high risk ones, but in the world of crypto often if the risk pays off it pays a lot.
– For some, though not much, more details about the Materia1 Decred (DCR) ASIC miners…
- Published in: Mining Hardware
- Related tags: Blake 256 miner, Blake-256, Blake-256 ASIC, DCR, DCR ASIC, DCR ASIC miner, DCRasic, Decred, Decred ASIC, Decred ASIC miner, Materia 1, Materia1, Materia1 DCR ASIC miner, Materia1 Decred ASIC miner, Materia1-TURBO
Some of you might remember that back in June Sia has announced their plans to develop a dedicated SiaCoin (SC) ASIC miner called the Obelisk SC1 capable of 300+ GH/S at 500W or less power consumption according to the latest information. Well, it seems that Sia has figured out that since Decred (DCR) uses a very similar algorithm to what SiaCoin (SC) uses (both being variations of Blake) they can also develop the first ASIC miner for Decred as well. The Obelisk DCR1 should be capable of at least 475 GH/s with less than 500W of power usage and both ASIC miners should be available at pretty much the same time.
So now the pre-sale of the first batch of 4000 Obelisk DCR1 ASIC miners for Decred (DCR) is up for pre-sale on the Obelist’s website along the Obelist SC1 ASIC miner pre-sale for SiaCoin (SC). Both pre-sales will run up until November 24th and they are expected to ship on or before June 30th, 2018. Both Obelisk ASIC miners are available for pre-order at a price of $2499 USD and come with a 6 week exclusive mining period and a $250 per-unit coupon for future Obelisk purchases as a bonus. Now, since this is a pre-order for a product that is currently in development we advice you to be extra careful as we’ve seen a fair share of fails in that area and a lot of empty promises. We are not saying anything for the Obelisk, it seems to have a solid team working on the project according to the information available, we are just warning you to be careful as it is a pre-order for a product that is not yet developed and the final device (if/when available) may as well be different in terms of specifications as we’ve seen that happening as well.
If by the second half of next year Sia manages to deliver on their promise with the Obelisk ASIC miners for SiaCoin (SC) and Decred (DCR) they will significantly change the landscape for these two crypto coins. Now it is yet unclear how this will affect things regarding the use of the Sia file hosting services since it is more than just a crypto coin while Decred is more of a traditional crypto coin. The promise of securing the network better with ASICs is not new, the more important question here however is what if a limited number of people hold most of the ASIC’s power in a network… and then it becomes pointless to mine if you do not have access to an ASIC miner and/or cannot afford one.
– For more details about the upcoming Obelisk DCR1 and Obelisk SC1 ASIC miners…
- Published in: Mining Hardware
- Related tags: asic miner, DCR ASIC, DCR ASIC miner, DCR miner, Decred ASIC, Decred ASIC miner, Decred miner, Obelisk, Obelisk ASIC, Obelisk DCR1, Obelisk Decred, Obelisk SC1, Obelisk SiaCoin, SC ASIC, SC ASIC miner, SC miner, SiaCoin ASIC, SiaCoin ASIC miner, SiaCoin miner
A couple of days ago Nvidia has announced their new Geforce GTX 1070 Ti series of video cards and has opened pre-orders with the shipping and official sales expected to start tomorrow in most regions around the world. Prior to the official release there were a lot of speculations about what the new GTX 1070 Ti will be offering and we already know that the new Ti model is actually not that much different. Nvidia probably did not want to endanger the sales of their GTX 1080 GPUs, so as one might expect the GTX 1070 Ti sits somewhere in between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 in terms of performance, though with overclock it will most likely be able to outperform the GTX 1080. There are some speculations that the new Ti will be overclocking pretty well and that is definitely good news for both gamers and miners. Let us take a quick look at the more important specs and how GTX 1070 Ti differs from the 1070 and 1080 GPUs from Nvidia (reference designs and clocks).
Looking at the specs comparison it seems that the new GTX 1070 Ti is almost the same as the GTX 1080 as far as GPU specs go (some extra clock should compensate for the less CUDA cores) with the biggest difference being the memory being used. The GTX 1080 uses the faster in terms of speed GDDR5X video memory and offers more bandwidth, but the memory timings are slower compared to the slower in terms of operating frequency GDDR5 used in the GTX 1070 Ti. While for gamers the memory latencies might not make that much of a difference for users and the faster frequency might be fine, for miners the memory timings are more important. So the GDDR5 memory used on the GTX 1070 Ti is good news for people mining memory intensive altcoins such as the ones using Ethash like Ethereum for example. Do note expect however to get much higher performance on these compared to the regular GTX 1070, in fact the new Ti should most likely get you a bit better performance in more GPU intensive algorithms due to the increased number of CUDA cores.
Of course we’ll need to do some testing when the new GPUs are finally out on the market and see how good their performance compared to the old GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080, but we already have a pretty good idea on what to expect. Do note that although Nvidia is using photos of a reference design GeForce GTX 1070 Ti with a Founders Edition cooler it seems that such a model is going to be only directly sold by Nvidia and not through partners, all other designs are non-reference ones with coolers already used for the GTX 1070 or 1080 models. As a result many people will not be ale to get their hands on the Founders Edition due to the fact that Nvidia does not have good distribution channels of their own and thus the company essentially ignores direct sales in many of the smaller markets around the world. Anyway, we already know that the new GTX 1070 Ti should be a great choice for multi-GPU mining rigs instead of the GTX 1070, although the deciding factor will most likely be the end user price of the new video cards… a price that is also expected to be somewhere in between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080.