Posts Tagged ‘Innosilicon’

The Innosilicon 14nm A4 Dominator Scrypt ASICs Coming Soon

31, Mar 2016

innosilicon-a4-dominator

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-power-efficiency-performance-table

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 A4 Dominator Scrypt ASICs Might Be Coming Soon

17, Nov 2015

innosilicon-logo

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.

AlcheMiner Planning to Launch Second Generation Scrypt ASICs

1, Nov 2015

alcheminer-logo

AlcheMiner has posted that they are planning to start work on a second generation Scrypt ASICs, however they are looking for investors to help them start the process and that they plan to gather $5 million to $7 million for the Alchemist II project. They are looking for serious investors offering multiple investment plans starting at 50K USD, 500K and 1 Million USD offering different benefits. According to the information published it will take them about five to six months for the first batch to be launched in the market after the fundraising goal is met. The new chips are supposed to be used in AlchemistII-128 128 MHS miner with 280W power usage priced at $1299 USD and AlchemistII-512 512 MHS miner with 1150W of power usage and a price of $4950 USD.

The brief specifications for the new chip:
– Hash rate: 2 MHS
– Power consumption on the wall: 3~4J (1.5J~2J/MHash)
– TSMC 28HPC tech node
– Full custom design

The problem with their offer is that with their first generation hardware things were not that bright, there were issues and delays, problems with some of their partners such as MAT. Now the company wants to find big investors for new Scrypt ASIC miners promising hardware delivery in half a year with not so attractive hardware prices although specs look promising. The problem is that their track record is not that good, even though they actually had some hardware released and the current situation with Scrypt crypto currencies including Litecoin is not so great at the moment. The low market price of LTC following the recent halving of the block reward and the general uncertainty in the future makes it hard for anyone to actually invest in Scrypt ASIC hardware that is actually not ready at the moment. The recent SFARDS fiasco with the company being very vocal prior to having their new hardware ready and then going completely silent after apparently it has been ready for market also does not do any good for initiatives like the one AlcheMiner is trying to do. So what you might be waiting with anticipation in regards to Scrypt ASIC hardware could only end up being the next generation Innosilicon hardware that might soon be available…


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