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Last year there was some information about the upcoming next generation of Scrypt ASICs from Innosilicon as the company was looking for investors. Back then they already had apparently designed and taped-out the A4 Dominator chips and needed sufficient investment to start making the chips using 14nm production process. Now, about four and a half months later Innosilicon comes with an official announcement of the final specifications and additional details of the upcoming A4 Dominator Scrypt ASICs that are apparently now entering into production.
The next generation Innosilicon Scrypt miner using 14nm ASIC is code-named A4 Dominator as already expected. This is a full custom optimized LTC mining ASIC with a focus on efficiency and cost, that should be capable of delivering up to 4 MHS per chip with as low as 1.5W of power usage per MHS efficiency in a DCDC less daisy chain configuration. This should allow for next gen Scrypt miners to offer 400 MHS to 500 MHS hash power per box, with easily over 300% better power efficiency over the previous generations. Initial batch of A4 ASIC chips is expected to be available in May for miner developer to design PCB and software, mass produced A4 ASIC/Miners should be available in June/July 2016 based on pre-order sequence.
Innosilicon A4 Dominator ASIC and Miner Specifications:
– A4 Miner: 400 MHS per 1 KW power supply in one standard miner box
– A4 ASIC: 3.5 MHS per chip performance at 2.5 W/MHS nominal
– Extreme Low Power: ASIC with large memory running at single rail 0.6V
– One Start and New PCB: eliminate the need of DC-DC components and enable 14 to 20 A4 chips – running off the single 12V DC supply
– PSU Requirements: common PCI-E 8 Pins/6+2 Pins with 12V output
– Included: Raspberry Pi running the user friendly A2 Terminator software
– Server Grid Reliability: Built-in high-procession temperature sensor for automatic chip protection and variable frequency operation to maximize chip life time
There is no word about pricing at the moment, but it seems that Innosilicon is finally going to beat the KnC Titan Scrypt ASIC miners in terms of performance and power usage as the king in Scrypt mining efficiency at the moment. Unlike KnC however whose miners are no longer available and were problematic as hell and quite expensive when launched, based on our experience with previous A2 miners we know that we can expect a more affordable and reliable product from Innosilicon that should not give you a lot of headaches like many Titans did. There is no word on pricing yet, but a somewhat acceptable price would be in the 2K USD range, otherwise there might be not much demand for it with the current market conditions. With the high expectations we had and the total failure that SFARDS turned out to be in making available their products our hopes for Innosilicon finally starting to do something on the LTC and Scrypt crypto currency mining front are high, but let us see what will happen this summer…
– The official announcement of the upcoming Innosilicon 14nm A4 Dominator Scyrpt ASICs…
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.
Thanks to our friends at MinerEU we were able to get remote access to test an early prototype of a A2BOX Scrypt ASIC miner. These miners us the new 28nm Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC chips, 48 of them on 6 modules with each chip running at 1.5M with about 10W power consumption. The total hashrate of the complete miner is 72 MHS and can be further overclocked up to about 80 MHS or even more. Do note that the tests below are ran on an early prototype of the miner, so the final products tat customers will receive will be improved and should handle even better. In fact after finishing the tests and reporting our findings there were apparently already some improvements on the software part that should improve the results people that get the final product will be getting. We are going to be doing some more tests probably later this week of the final production units to check the progress, so stay tuned for more interesting information. For the moment we are only able to provide some first impressions and performance results from our remote access testing. We are going to try to also do a hands on review later on when we are able to get our hands on the actual hardware.
The miner itself is contained in a 4U case and aside from the 6 modules with the ASIC chips it also has a power supply inside the case as well as a Raspberry Pi controller with the software to control the miner. The software itself is a modified version of cgminer 3.9.0 with support for the Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC chips and by default it is only a console only version of the miner, though the unit we tested also had Scripta installed to make it easier to monitor and control the miner. In overall things were running pretty smooth and easy with the cgminer in the back and Scripta as a frontend, though we’ve noticed some things that could be improved and hopefully they will be in the final miners that will be shipped to people that have ordered them. The 72-80 MHS A2BOX miners are pretty big and expensive at $12000 USD each, so they are not going to be accessible to all, however we may also get smaller units with 1 or 2 modules available as well that should be slower in terms of hashrate, but also more affordable and easier to get by miners that have a smaller budget for hardware.
The default operating frequency as per the A2 chips specifications is 1 GHz with a 1.5 MHS hashrate per chip running at that frequency, though the chips should be capable of 1.1 GHz with 1.65 MHS and 1.2 GHz with 1.8 MHS per chip. Increasing the operating frequency will bring up the power consumption and the heat generated, so proper cooling gets more important in order to actually get higher performance. The modified cgminer 3.9.0 with support for A2 on the Raspberry Pi actually allowed us to set a frequency of 1000, 1080, 1100, 1200, 1280, 1300 and 1400, if set to over 1400 MHz or under 1000 MHz defaults to 1000 MHz. Another good thing is that you can set individual frequency for each module, so you can find out if any of them can work fine at a higher frequency an other at low for optimum performance. It would be good however if a finer grain frequencies could be set by the user as currently the steps you can set in terms of operating frequency are pretty high.
Here is how things looked at 1200 MHz operating frequency of the miner, pretty much the highest one that is worth running the miner at. Scripta is reporting 87 MHS local hashrate and at the pool (scryptguild) we are getting about 80 MHS average, so pretty much what is promised as achievable in terms of overclocking. Do note however that two of the modules are running at lower hashrate as compared to the others and we have found the reason for that is some cores on the chips withing the two modules were not fully functional. Do remember however that here we are testing an earlier prototype of the miner, so it is expected that some things might not be working perfectly, though the good thing is that cgminer reports that and if you have similar problem you will be able to easily notice it when running the miner. We suspect that the reason for getting significantly higher number of HW errors on these two particular modules is also a result from that fact. But even in that situation we are still getting pretty good results when overclocked to 1200 MHz, even with higher than recommended number of HW errors. We got a notice that further optimizations have been made to reduce the HW errors, so the final products should be handling better.
Example output for module 3, 410 active cores out of 432:
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] spidev0.0(cs3): Found 8 A1 chips
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 1 with 52 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 2 with 51 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 3 with 53 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 4 with 42 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 5 with 52 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 6 with 53 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 7 with 54 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found chip 8 with 53 active cores
[2014-05-08 13:50:02] Found 8 chips with total 410 active cores
Going higher in terms of overclocking brings up the local hashrate, however it also reduces the poolside one due to lower efficiency of the chips as more HW errors are being generated. So for example at 1280 MHz we were getting about 92 MHS local hashrate, but just 72 MHS poolside, clearly showing that there is no point to go higher than 1200 MHz, even when cgminer allows us to set the frequency up to 1400 MHz. Going a step lower to 1100 MHz we’ve got about 81 MHS local hashrate and about 77 MHS poolside, so at that frequency we are getting a lower difference between the local and the poolside hashrate than at 1200 MHz. Going one more step down to the default frequency of 1000 MHz (the minimum allowable by cgminer) we’ve managed to get about 72 MHS local hashrate and about 65 MHS poolside, so it seems that 1100 MHz seemed the optimal one where you are not pushing the chips too much. We have noticed that even at the lower operating frequencies the number of HW errors of the two modules that had some of their cores not properly working were still at more than 10% which is a value that is a bit too much for an ASIC device. So it seemed that the problematic cores were indeed the cause of us getting more HW errors and not pushing the chips to a higher frequency and with all of the chips properly working the local and poolside hashrate should increase a bit more than the one we’ve managed to get out of the early prototype that we were testing here.
In short, the new A2BOX miners based on Innosillicon A2 Srypt ASIC chips do seem to work quite good and stable, though there are still some thing that needed work and improvement. Hopefully they will be addressed in time for the final production miners to start shipping to people and we already got information as mentioned that things have been improved already and we are soon going to be able to remotely test not an early prototype, but a final product to confirm this by ourselves, so stay tuned for more information.