BitMain Ready to Start Shipping 28nm Bitcoin ASICs

21 Jun
2014

antminer-bm1382-chips

BitMain and their 55nm BM1380 SHA256 ASIC chip and the miners that the company has released based on it are quite popular and now the company has announced that they are ready with their new 28nm ASIC chip – the BM1382. As you can already guess the new chips will be offering higher performance at a lower power consumption, so you can get more powerful miners with the same size and power usage as the previous generation with the help of the new chips. The track record of the company is so far very good thanks to the fact that they are not using pre-orders, but ship from stock and announce products when they are ready for shipping, so you can get them fast at a good price and start hashing right away.

BM1382 has achieved 15.75 Gh/s in hash performance, consuming less than 9.33 W on chip level at 0.75V. This means 0.59 J/GH on chip. If the core voltage is at 0.63V, the efficiency will be 0.40 J/GH on chip. BM1382 will bring the power efficiency of Bitcoin mining industry to a new level which has not been massively achieved before. BM1382 represents a 20% power saving on its previous generation of 55nm chips and nearly 10 times of better physical densification, which will further improve the safety of the decentralized ecosystem.


BitMain BM1382 chip specifications:

– Process Node: 28nm
– Package Type: FCQFN-56
– Packaged Chip Size: 8mm x 8mm
– Number of Cores: 63
– Core Voltage: 0.75 V
– Core Frequency: 250 MHz
– Hash Rate: 15.75 GH/s
– Power Consumption: 0.59 J/GH (chip level, and it can be lower to 0.40J/GH by lowering the core voltage)

antminer-s3-miner

The first devices that we already expect to be available, probably by the end of this month, from BitMain based on the new BM1382 ASIC chips will be the AntMiner S3 miners. Devices, that will follow the design of the very popular AntMiner S1 blade miner. According to BitMain each S3 should be using 32 BM1382 chips and be able to provide a hashrate of 504 GHS with a power consumption of about 390W from the wall. So this is close to almost 3 times the hashrate of the old S1 with pretty much the same power consumption, not bad at all, but we also need to see this coupled with an attractive price. The new S3 miners have the potential to become a great option for smaller miners that want to be able to mine Bitcoin or other SHA-256 crypto currencies.


AntMner S3 Specifications:

– Effective Hash Rate: 504 GH/s±5%
– Power Consumption: 390 W on wall
– Power Supply: 4 +12V DC input, PCI-e connectors
– Power Efficiency: 0.77 J/GH on wall
– Size: 331 mm x 137 mm x 160 mm (Dual blades assembled inside a box, including the fans)
– Fans: Two 14038 fans mounted on both front and back ends.)
– Operating Temperature: 0 °C to 35 °C
– Complied with: FCC / CE
– Network Connection: Ethernet

We don’t know what the exact price will be, but considering that the company is able to offer 1 THS miner based on the 55nm older chips for a price of $1850 USD at the moment, the half of that hashrate and smaller and easier to produce new AntMiner S3 ASIC miners should be not more than lets say $750 USD, but that is actually a bit expensive. They need to be sold at a price of about 1 BTC or even less in order to become really more interesting for the users and to offer a foreseeable return of investment and some profit for the miners.

Nvidia GPU Mining Profit Calculator Software

20 Jun
2014

nvidia-profit-calculator-kbomba

Here is a nice and useful software for everyone using Nvidia GPUs for mining crypto coins, especially for people that have built mining rigs based on the very popular for mining GeForce GTX 750 Ti video cards. The tool is called Profit Calculator and in open source, being developed by a user called KBomba. It queries different crypto exchanges such as Bittrex, Mintpal and Cryptsy for coin prices, uses services like WhatToMine, CoinTweak and CoinWarz for the current coin difficulty and block rewards and also checks NiceHash for their current prices as well as PoolPicker for the most profitable pools. The result you get is a list based on profitability that includes not only the most profitable coins to mine, but also the most profitable multipools as well with an estimate on the expected revenue.

The hashrate values that are preset in the tool by default are for a single GTX 750 Ti GPU, but you can change them for other cards if you know the hashrate values of your hardware for the different algorithms. This actually makes the tool usable not only for Nvidia, but also for AMD-based mining rigs as well, though you should first check what hashrate will your hardware be able to provide in order to be able to get more accurate results for what your earnings should be. So do give the tool a try, it can be quite useful even if the results may not always be absolutely accurate, you can still get a pretty good idea about the current market and coin profitability.

– Here you can download the Nvidia GPU Mining Profit Calculator by KBomba…

Simple Script to Restart your Miner Software After a Given Period of Time

19 Jun
2014

miner-restart-script-windows

There were some people asking for a simple solution to automate the process of restarting a miner software every few hours in order to be sure that it is working fine under Windows OS. The below Batch file code example offers a simple and easy way to do that and it uses sandor’s fork of cpuminer for Gridseed Scrypt ASICs as an example. You need to set the parameters based on the miner and command line you use as well as the time after which the miner process will be killed (default 4 hours), then the script will wait for 10 seconds and start the miner again. There is also a counter to show you the number of restarts that have been executed since you’ve started the Batch script.

@echo off

echo -------------------------------------------------------------------
echo Simple script to restart your miner software after a period of time
echo -------------------------------------------------------------------
echo:

set executable=minerd.exe
set commandline=--freq=1150 --gc3355=\\.\COM1 --url=stratum+tcp://eu2.multipool.us:7777 --userpass=yourworker.1:password
set runforseconds=14400
set restartinseconds=10
set /a counter=0

:start
start "Miner Window" %executable% %commandline%
echo:
echo The software will run for %runforseconds% seconds
timeout %runforseconds%
taskkill /f /im %executable%
echo:
echo Restarting the software in %restartinseconds% seconds (%counter%)
timeout %restartinseconds%
set /a counter+=1
echo:
echo:
goto start

In order to use the code above you just have to copy it and save as a .BAT file as well as to modify some of the variables as per your needs and requirements and then run it. Do note that you will get two program windows, one that will have the Batch script running and another for the miner software. You should not close the windows with the script running as this will stop the execution of the script immediately and the miner software will not be restarted anymore.

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