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Move away Antminer Z9 Mini, Bitmain is starting to sell the “full” Antminer Z9 that will supposedly offer 40000 Sol/s for Equihash mining at 1150W of power usage with deliveries starting at the beginning of September and priced at $3319 USD (PSU is not included). For comparison the already available Antminer Z9 Mini offered just 10000 at about 250W of power usage. On the other hand there is also the Innosilicon A9 ZMaster Equihash ASIC Miner that offers 50 Ksol/s at just 620 Watts of power usage, but at three times higher price and currently out is of stock.
Bitmain is currently showing only a rendering of the new device, not an actual photo, but it seems like two slightly longer Z9 Minis stitched together (maybe an extra chip or to per board). We already know that the chips used in the Z9 Mini are overclocking pretty well, so two Z9 Minis can easily reach 30 KSol/s at maybe about 700 Watts and three overclocked units can go for as much as 45 KSol/s with just about a Kilowatt of power usage. Considering this and the fact that the device apparently only has 7 PCI-E power connectors (6 for ASIC boards and 1 for the control board) we can easily assume that Bitmain may have achieved the high power usage with less chips that are already overclocked quite a lot. If they did do just that the price of the new “more powerful” units may not be justified and you should not be expecting to see a lot of headroom for improving performance like on the Minis.
– For more information about the new Bitmain Antminer Z9 40K Sol/s ASIC Miner for Equihash…
Bitcoin Gold’s New Equihash-BTG PoW Algorithm
13, Jun 2018
Bitmain’s Equihash ASIC miners Z9 mini as well as Innosilicon’s A9 ZMaster are apparently being shipped and are getting into the hands of some users already. This essentially makes mining Equihash with GPUs pointless and not very profitable, so ZCash (ZEC) is already in the territory of ASIC miners, but not all of the crypto coins that used Equihash are going to just move from GPU mining to ASIC miners. Bitcoin Gold (BTG) for example is going to switch to a new proof of work algorithm they call Equihash-BTG which is essentially a modified version of the Equihash algorithm that will not be ASIC mineable.
Equihash-BTG is essentially going to fork to a modified version of the Equihash PoW algorithm with parameters that will require significantly more memory thus making ASIC miners harder to be made for it and no so efficient. We have already seen that with ASIC miners having a higher memory requirement makes it not impossible, but more like much less efficient performance wise if we consider as an example the Bitmain Antminer E3 ASIC miner for Ethereum’s Ethash algorithm. So Bitcoin Gold (BTC) will not become ASIC resistant forever with its algorithm change, but it will be safe for quite some time at least as we all know when there is an incentive (a lot of money involved) nothing can stop the ASIC miners.
The change of the PoW algorithm used by Bitcoin Gold will become active with a Hard Fork, though there is still no information or a planned block number or date when the fork will happen. So for the moment BTG is still using Equihash and can be mined using ASIC miners designed for this algorithm, but when it switches to the new algorithm it will be GPU mineable again and hopefully it will be still worth mining it by that time.
– For more details about Bitcoin Gold’s new Equihash-BTG PoW algorithm…
PinIdea 17GHS X11 ASIC Miner DR-100
27, Aug 2017
PinIdea has updated their product range with a new 17GHS X11 ASIC miner named DR-100 in order to be able to cope up with the increased competition from Bitmain and Innosilicon with their recently announced new X11 miners offering significant X11 hashrate boost. PinIdea seems to be planning to start shipping their new X11 ASIC miner in September with first-come first-served principle. Currently the miner is already out of stock due to the big demand apparently (or limited number of units), even with the price of a single unit close to almost 3 BTC.
PinIdea DR-100 X11 ASIC specifications:
– HashRate: 17000 MHS (+-5%)
– Power: 820W (wall power +-5%)
– Dimensions: 28cm x 18cm(h) x 15cm(w)
– Weight: 5KG
– Interface: Lan (100m/1000m)
– Fan: 2x 14038 Double ball fan (55DB)
– Operating Temperature: 0C~40C
– Mining Software: Custom CGminer
– For more information about the PinIdea 17GHS X11 ASIC Miner DR-100…