Posts Tagged ‘Gridseed’

The SFARDS SF3301 Dual-Algorithm ASICs Coming as Early as Next Month

20, Mar 2015

sfards-logo

Last year Gridseed and WiiBox have officially merged to become known as SFARDS. And the new company has recently announced that they have taped out their 28nm SF3301 Dual-Algorithm ASIC chips that should be capable of mining both Bitcoin (SHA256) and Litecoin (scrypt) as the same time similar as an idea to what Gridseed offered in terms of mining hardware last year. By using FD-SOI technology the power efficiency when mining with SHA-256 is expected to reach below the 0.3 J/GH range, and 2.0 J/MH when mining with Scrypt according to SFARDS. The new company expects to have their first ASIC dual miners as early as April and hopefully we are going to get some more details about expected specifications very soon.

The big question that arises is what kind of performance have they managed to get out from their 28nm SF3301 ASIC chips for mining SHA-256 and Scrypt algorithms separately as well as when mining them together and of course what will be the price of the miners. People are hoping that the new miners could bring back the interest in Litecoin and bring up the exchange rate as it has been pretty low for quite a while, especially after the bad news from Zeus and Bitmain that canceled he development of their latest generation of Scrypt ASIC hardware that was initially expected to hit the market by the end of 2014.

– For more information about the new SFARDS ASIC mining hardware manufacturer…

ZeusHash With Promotional Prices and Partnership with Gridseed

18, Nov 2014

zeushash-new-price-promotion

It seems that ZeusMiner is now pretty much a cloud mining service provider as the company is apparently moving towards focusing on offering Bitcoin and Litecoin cloud mining hashrate though their service ZeusHash. The company has been announcing multiple partnerships with other ASIC manufacturers, but the focus of these is towards getting mining hardware for their cloud mining service as apparently ZeusMiner has no plans to continue making hardware themselves after canceling their GEN III product plans. A new partnership has been announced with Gridseed as a hardware provider for the cloud mining operation along with a slight reduction of the current maintenance fees from $0.059 to $0.058 USD per MHS for the Scrypt hashrate. Gridseed has been silent for a while now after being the first company to go out with Scrypt ASIC miners earlier this year and they are probably working on the next generation hardware already. Regarding the cloud mining pricing, ZeusHash has also announced a Thanksgiving Promotion on the Litecoin MHS prices that will be running from November 17th to 27th. The new prices might be of interest mostly to people that are willing to invest in more serious hashrates as then the prices become more attractive. The not so good news is that apparently the Litecoin network difficulty is seeing some significant increases lately, so making bigger investments at the moment may not be the wisest idea. Interestingly enough we are yet to see a cloud mining provider offering some great deals for the upcoming Black Friday.

– For more information about the current price promotions from ZeusHash….

PiMP Linux-based Dedicated GPU and ASIC Mining Distribution

5, Aug 2014

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PiMP or Portable Instant Mining Platform is a dedicated Linux-based mining distribution intended for GPU and ASIC mining without the need to rely on Windows. PiMP is designed to be easy to deploy and use, it can be installed on a USB flash drive, so you do not necessarily have to use a hard drive on your GPU mining rig, though you can install it on SSD or HDD as well. The latest version of PiPM is designed for AMD GPUs only as well as Scrypt ASIC miners such as Gridseed and ZeusMiner, and you can also use other popular SHA-256 ASIC miners. In terms of GPU support you can mine not only Scrypt (Already pointless for GPU mining), but also Scrypt-Jane, Scrypt-N, Quark, X11, X13, X15, Keccak, Skein, Groestl, Qubit, HEFTY1, JHA and NIST5. As you can see not all of the latest and GPU algorithms are yet supported, but the most commonly used and supported ones are available in the distribution.

And while the latest version of PiMP is still only available for AMD-based GPU mining rigs, there is already work being done for the addition of a version of the Linux mining distribution intended for miners using Nvidia-based GPUs (you can try the already available KopiemTu for Nvidia). There is also work being done on an ASIC only version designed for PCs as well as for Raspberry Pi controllers to be used as mining controllers for ASIC miners. So we are looking forward to seeing these versions as well and meanwhile you can check out the AMD/ASIC version that is already available. Here we are more of a Windows miners, however we do like to try out new things as well and check out Linux-based mining distributions like PiMP as well as use RPi as a mining controllers as well and we like what we are seeing so far with PiMP.

– For more information and to try out the PiMP Linux mining distribution yourself…


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