Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

The First X11 Mining ASIC iBeLink DM384M ASIC DASH Miner

18, Feb 2016

ibelink-dm384m-x11-asic-miner

Interesting announcement for what seems to be the the world the first X11 ASIC miner as well as the 1st DASH ASIC miner called iBelink DM384M. Developed by Tiannengbo Group, a consortium of high tech companies based in China. The iBeLink DM384M Dash miner contains 4 hashing blades and a Raspberry Pi B+. Each hashing blade contains 48 TNB0301 ASIC chips, and can be managed (or controlled) for mining separately. The total hashrate of one unit is supposed to be 384 MHS with a total power consumption of 715 W. We could not find any additional information other than what is posted by DualMiner who will apparently be selling the first units of the device, so we are not yet able to confirm for sure if this is real X11 ASIC miner. We are going to be keeping a close eye on this as it really seems a very promising alternative to GPU mining of X11 and could easily bring the end of X11 mining with video cards if true.

iBeLink DM384M Miner Specifications:
– Hash Rate: 384 MH/s ±10%
– Power Consumption: 715 W (at the wall, with 25C ambient temp)
– Power Efficiency: 1.8 J/MH (at the wall, with 25°C ambient temp)
– Number of TNB0301 chips per unit: 192
– Operating Temperature: 0 °C to 40 °C
– Network Connection: Ethernet
– Power Supply: 110V to 240V, 50Hz/60Hz
– Certifications: FC, CE
– Dimensions: 490mm(L)*350mm(W)*180mm(H)
– Weight: 21kg

ibelink-dm384m-x11-asic-miner-2

Miner Features:
– High integration for Plug and play (just need to connect power and Ethernet)
– Contains 4 hashing blades, LED for each blade’s status
– Faulty conditions self-detection and auto restart
– Email warning for abnormal hashing conditions
– Faulty chip detection
– Possible DIY repairing faulty hashing boards (modulated hashing board, 8 boards/blade)
– DIY reducing fan speed(or noise) by selecting low voltage power (reduced hash rate)

tnb0301-x11-asic-mining-chip

TNB0301 Chip ASIC Specification:
– Package Type: QFN64 8mm*8mm
– I/O Interface: Serial with clock & data
– Hash Rate: 2 Mhash/s
– Power Consumption: 1.8 J/Mhash

The first batch of 50 iBeLink DM384M units will be sold through dualminer.com online store exclusively. iBeLink DM384M price is $2,098 USD, which includes shipping and handling. Orders will be shipped to your address directly from China through UPS Worldwide Saver service. In general, it should take one to two weeks for your order to reach you. If your shipping costs are more than $300.00, additional shipping fees may be charged. Payment is accepted in the form of Bitcoin (Bitpay will convert your BTC to USD immediately) for any quantity order, or bank wire transfer for 3 units or more. Shipping is set for the 1st week of March.

Innosilicon A4 Dominator Scrypt ASICs Might Be Coming Soon

17, Nov 2015

innosilicon-logo

Innosilicon is apparently looking for investors into their new A4 Dominator Scrypt ASIC (both chips and miners based on them) to help them bringing the new the next generation 14nm chips on the market in a few months time with 1.2 Watt power usage per MHS. It seems that they have already designed and taped-out the A4 Dominator chips and are now entering the next round of full mask mass production using apparently Globalfoundries 14nm production process.

A4 Dominator ASIC & Miner Specifications:
– A4 ASIC: 3 MHS per chip at 3.6W nominal, support DCDC less PCB
– Extreme Low Power: daisy chained ASIC running at 0.7V, only in 14nm
– Miner Performance: 600 MHS from 720W at the Wall or 850 MHS from 1020W
– PSU Requirements: common PCI-E 8 Pins/6+2Pins with 12V output
– Included: Reprisal Pi running the most user friendly A2 terminator Software

“We have opened our A4 ASIC/Miner production to committed partners in order to share in both the cost and the profit. Anyone who commits $1.5 million to this partnership will get to share our ASIC production masks or purchase miners at cost for your mining farms. We have fully de-risked the design by shouldering all the R&D and MPW costs for the testchips. Also, we will showcase our testchip and test miners in couple of months to demonstrate the A4’s unsurpassable efficiency. We need only 4 to 5 partners to participate in this incredible risk free win-win partnership round.”

Apart from the new A4 chips that will be for Scrypt the company is also working on new A3 chips for SHA-256 that apparently offer less than 0.2 Watt per GHS, so things should be similar to their first generation A1 for BTC and A2 for LTC mining hardware. In our opinion however Innosilicon will have to work on something else as well and that is securing partners to make their mining hardware more easily accessible to users and not only to large mining operations. They could also work on an approach similar to that of Bitmain to offer direct sales to end users as apparently they could be the new driving force behind Scrypt mining with SFARDS going completely silent and other companies just now starting to look for partners to work on development and not production.

AlcheMiner Planning to Launch Second Generation Scrypt ASICs

1, Nov 2015

alcheminer-logo

AlcheMiner has posted that they are planning to start work on a second generation Scrypt ASICs, however they are looking for investors to help them start the process and that they plan to gather $5 million to $7 million for the Alchemist II project. They are looking for serious investors offering multiple investment plans starting at 50K USD, 500K and 1 Million USD offering different benefits. According to the information published it will take them about five to six months for the first batch to be launched in the market after the fundraising goal is met. The new chips are supposed to be used in AlchemistII-128 128 MHS miner with 280W power usage priced at $1299 USD and AlchemistII-512 512 MHS miner with 1150W of power usage and a price of $4950 USD.

The brief specifications for the new chip:
– Hash rate: 2 MHS
– Power consumption on the wall: 3~4J (1.5J~2J/MHash)
– TSMC 28HPC tech node
– Full custom design

The problem with their offer is that with their first generation hardware things were not that bright, there were issues and delays, problems with some of their partners such as MAT. Now the company wants to find big investors for new Scrypt ASIC miners promising hardware delivery in half a year with not so attractive hardware prices although specs look promising. The problem is that their track record is not that good, even though they actually had some hardware released and the current situation with Scrypt crypto currencies including Litecoin is not so great at the moment. The low market price of LTC following the recent halving of the block reward and the general uncertainty in the future makes it hard for anyone to actually invest in Scrypt ASIC hardware that is actually not ready at the moment. The recent SFARDS fiasco with the company being very vocal prior to having their new hardware ready and then going completely silent after apparently it has been ready for market also does not do any good for initiatives like the one AlcheMiner is trying to do. So what you might be waiting with anticipation in regards to Scrypt ASIC hardware could only end up being the next generation Innosilicon hardware that might soon be available…


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