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Anyone Still Expecting ASICs From Alpha Technology
16, Nov 2014
The Alpha Technology Scrypt ASIC manufacturer has been silent for more than a month already since their last update, even though they did promise to release a video of a prototype miner after showing pictures of the chips that they have apparently received already. Since then however there is no word on anything going on, no video, no new delay information for the shipment schedule of the actual products, no nothing. Interesting enough the company seems to be still sending partial refunds to users that wanted to get these instead of continue to wait for hardware. In the end the intention of Alpha Technology could’ve been just that – promise something, not delivering it and returning a percentage of the money they’ve got from customers, and keeping the rest. It all sounds a lot like a classic scheme for a scam as apparently the company does not plan to deliver anything, even if they have actually made some hardware, or at least things look more and more like that is the case. In the meantime customers are apparently working on taking legal action against the company, though it seems that many have already asked and received partial refunds and have given up completely on dealing with Alpha Technology as well.
Feathercoin (FTC) has hard forked from the Scrypt algorithm to the NeoScrypt as was announced earlier this year after block 432000. You need to update your wallet to Feathercoin 0.8.7.0 in order to continue using it after the NeoScrypt update and you need to download a special version of cgminer with support for the NeoScrypt algorithm (link below). The goal of the hard fork away from the Scrypt algorithm is to make FTC not mineable with Scrypt ASIC miners giving back the opportunity to GPU miners to mine the coin. Currently the profitability of mining FTC is quite high compared to other coins that are being mined with GPUs, so there is high interest in Feathercoin at the moment. Do note that here is no special miner dedicated for Nvidia miners to mine NeoScrypt using CUDA, however the version of the cgminer with NeoScrypt support actually works quite well not only on AMD, but on Nvidia GPUs as well using OpenCL. The screenshot above is from a GeForce GTX 750 Ti video card at stock frequencies giving a bit over 40 KHS and with some overclock you should be able to push the performance of a single GTX 750 to about 50 KH/S.
Mining with cgminer 3.7.7B with NeoScrypt support (source) on AMD GPUs has something that you make sure to do to get the best performance out of your GPUs. You need to make sure you have Catalyst drivers 13.11 installed, and then run the cgminer to compile the kernel with the settings you are using, then update to the latest 14.9 drivers and run the miner with the already generated kernel (BIN) file with the old drivers. Make sure you don’t change settings affecting the kernel after getting back to the latest video drivers as this will invoke the compilation of a new kernel that will not work and you will most likely be getting HW errors only. Generating kernel with newer drivers and not using a kernel generated with the older 13.11 drivers will not work and you will be getting only hardware errors instead of actual work being done. This is a bit of inconvenience, but you will have to do the driver trick only once and hopefully there will be a fix for this in the future as well as further performance improvements. Currently we are getting about 90-100 KH/s on a single AMD Radeon R9 280X GPU, so the performance on Nvidia graphics cards compared to AMD is looking very nice considering that we are using OpenCL and not CUDA.
– You can download the cgminer 3.7.7b with NeoScrypt support for Windows OS here…
KnCMiner has posted something interesting on Twitter in response to the story about them stopping to sell mining hardware to end users and focusing on building their data centers that was started by Bloomberd, apparently the company does not have such plans and is already working on something new to be introduced by the end of the year. It is a fact however that at the moment KnCMiner is not selling miners to customers, their Neptune Bitcoin miners and Titan Scrypt miners are not being sold – they are listed as out of stock. The cloud mining services that are apparently being offered are in fact also not being sold as no matter what location you set you cannot complete the purchase of hashrate (there is a mention about the cloud offer “available in select territories”, but no mention which ones if any). Furthermore many of the current customers are not happy with KnCMiner as they are failing to deliver on their promises, a lot of people are still waiting for their long promised bonus Bitcoin miners and many people still have not received their Titan Scrypt ASICs even though the we are already past the promised Q2/Q3 delivery. The people that have received their Titan miners are complaining from various issues and KNC is not issuing refunds even after failing to deliver on their promises. So with the current not so favorable situation for the company, even if they try to continue to sell mining hardware to end users they may find it hard to convince people to buy it…