kncminer-titan-300-mhs-scrypt-asic

KnCMiner has revealed some more additional details about the chips that are going to be used in their upcoming Scrypt ASIC miners, the now already expected to provide a hashrate of 300 MHS Titan. It seems that each KnC Titan will will have four Scrypt ASIC chips in order to make sure they’ll output the guaranteed minimum performance of 300 MHS. Each chip will have 2284 cores that will be able to run 18272 threads simultaneously and will have 300MB of onboard memory. And since we are going to have 4 chips in each miner, this means that each Titan will come with 9136 cores running 73088 threads in total and resulting 300 MHS of Scrypt hashrate.

KnC says they were able to squeeze all of that in a 55 mm x 55 mm package while simultaneously extracting over 300 Watts worth of thermal energy, so it will be interesting to see how will they be able to cool these units. This however means that the total power consumption for a 4 chip Titan could go up to 1200W. According to KnCMiner the final tape out of the chips should happen within the next few weeks, or with other words the miners are not going to be ready to ship in Q2 and early Q3 is probably way too optimistic… so maybe something like August or September seems like a reasonable expectations. The price of the 300 MHS KnCMiner Titan Scrypt ASIC miner is still $9995 USD without VAT.

With all that said we are already seeing Scrypt-based ASIC miners using the Innosilicon’s A2 28nm chips to be already on sale and apparently shipping. And while these are more expensive and go only up to about 80-90 MHS, they can be further scaled up with more modules, the problem that remains however is that they come pretty expensive, though you can get them without having to wait them on pre-order. So it will be very interesting to see how will things progress on the Scrypt ASIC market in the next few months. Zeus is also expected to start shipping their first batch of 55 nm Scrypt ASIC miners in just 5 more days, so these should be able to fill in the gap between the smaller Gridseed’s GC3355-based miners and the Innosilicon A2-based big miners.

ccminer-new-x11-performance-update-780-ti

The ccMiner software miner for Nvidia GPUs has received another update of the source code with improved performance for X11 algorithm mining, so you should be getting higher hashrate when mining crypto currencies such as DarkCoin. We have compiled a binary for Windows that you can find below and try on your Nvidia GPU. The performance that the current optimized code for X11 offers on our test GeForce GTX 780 Ti GPU is almost 4.7 MHS (non overclocked) and with the previous 1.0 release of ccminer we were getting hashrate of about 2.8 MHS when mining DarkCoin. On a GTX 750 Ti you are probably going to get pretty much the same performance that a Radeon R9 280X currently has for X11 mining or about 2 MHS or slightly more. So now Nvidia clearly has the advantage in X11 mining in terms of performance over AMD.

Do note that the windows binary you can download below is compiled for Compute 3.0, 3.5 and 5.0 cards (32-bit version only), so it will not work on older cards. It is also compiled with Visual Studio 2012, so if you do not already have Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 you will have to download and install it, otherwise you may be getting error for a missing DLL library.

To download the latest ccMiner 1.0 beta with improved X11 performance for Windows OS…

uscc-bitcoins-uncertain-future-in-china

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an organization created to monitor, investigate, and submit to the United States Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has published an interesting report. The research report is called Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China and covers what has happened in the world of Bitcoin in the last few months with China entering strongly the market and now slowly withdrawing from it and covers what can happen in the future with Bitcoin in China and how can that affect Bitcoin globally. If you haven’t been following what was going on in China regarding Bitcoin and how the Chinese government is apparently trying to affect Bitcoin trading in the country you can get up to speed by checking out the document that is freely available.

To read the full USCC research paper Bitcoin’s Uncertain Future in China in PDF format…

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