Posts Tagged ‘Jasminer’

Bitmain Has Announced the Upcoming AntMiner E9 Pro ETC Miners

1, Feb 2023

The sale of the updated Pro version of the AntMiner E9 ETC/ETC miner is apparently going to start in a few days according to a tweet from Bitmain. The new Bitmain AntMiner E9 Pro ETC miner is supposed to deliver 3680 MH/s with 2200 Watts of power usage or 0.6J per MH/s efficiency with a price of $1299 USD per unit (without shipping and taxes) with the sales starting on February 3rd (up to 50 miners per order maximum). The new ETChash miner is not yet listed on the official website, but should soon appear with sales about to start right very soon, it certainly is a nice improvement in terms of hashrate and efficiency compared to the older non-pro E9 model offering 2400 MH/s at 1920 Watts of power usage (0.8 J/M). No word on the amount of available memory on the new E9 Pro units, but it is most likely 6GB like on the older E9 models, so that should cover ETC DAG sizes for quite some time.

With the AntMiner E9 Pro Bitmain is reaching the same level of efficiency as the latest generation of compact iPollo ETH/ETC miners, though iPollo is yet to update their larger miners with the latest hardware and to offer such low prices as Bitmain. Jasminer is still outperforming both iPollo and Bitmain in terms of power efficiency with their ETH/ETC miners, however they do come at a higher price and are yet to support dual-mining. Bitmain has not offered dual-mining for ETH/ETC and ZIL on their previous E9 devices and we are most likely not going to see ZIL dual-mining support on the new models as well, or at least no work yet about it. So, with the current low mining profitability of ETC and improvement in terms of hashrate and power efficiency is nice, but an addition of extra 30 or more percent mining profit from dual-mining with ZIL is something that everyone would love to have. For now, only iPollo does provide support for dual-mining with ZIL on their latest firmware, so it will be nice to also see them updating their larger miners with the latest hardware and with a more affordable price.

Upcoming JASMINER X16-Q High Throughput 3U Quiet Server Ethash Miner

28, Nov 2022

A few days ago, Jasminer has teased with an upcoming new Ethash/ETChash miner called X16 and now there is more information regarding the specifications and pricing of the new device available. Jasminer and their X4 chips are currently one the most efficient solution for mining ETH-based DAG coins and their upcoming X16 chips should be capable of delivering even better performance. The newly released information form Jasminer states that their new Jasminer X16-Q (an upgraded version of their X4-Q quiet miner) is supposed to be capable of 1845 MH/s hashrate for Ethash/ETChash with 630 Watts of power usage or 2.93 Megahash per Watt (0.34 J/MH efficiency). As comparison the X4-Q does offer 2.17 Megahash per Watt power efficiency (1040 MH/s at 480 Watts or 0.46 J/MH efficiency), so a nice improvement in power efficiency and is is not only higher hashrate with lower power usage apparently. The new X16 miners should also come with 8GB of memory available for larger DAG coins as compared to the just 5GB available with the current generation of X4 devices.

The price cited on the official Jasminer website for their upcoming JASMINER X16-Q High Throughput 3U Quiet Server is $2799 USD, though there is no stock and you cannot apparently pre-order the device… it has not been released for sale yet. The device is rated at just 40 dB as noise level thus it continues the legacy of the X4-Q for a quiet miner that can be used at home as a space heater, however the release timeframe for the new model does not make it very attractive for such use as it will apparently miss the cold winter days. According to Jingle Mining, an official Jasminer reseller, the expected delivery date for the new X16-Q devices is somewhere in between May 1st and May 31st next year, so quite a bit of time before these make it on the market apparently.

There is currently no word regarding support for Nicehash and Dual-Mining Ethash/ETChash coins with Zilliqa (ZIL) however for the new X16 products as currently one of the main drawbacks of the Jasminer X4 devices in realizing their maximum potential and profitability is the lack of support for these. It will be nice to see a solution for Nicehash and Dual-Mining with ZIL as they can improve profitability of the existing and upcoming devices significantly at the moment and make them more interesting for miners in the current not so favourable mining conditions where even being able to cover for electricity costs is a challenge. Guess we’ll have to wait a bit more and see if these will be addressed or not, and by the time the new miner is released on the market it is also possible that even without these available the profitability might make them not much of a problem like they are currently.

– To get more details about the Jasminer X16-Q on the official website…

Additional Improvement for a Silent Modified Jasminer X4 1U ASIC Miner

10, Nov 2022

It seems that we kind of missed something important in the silent modification of the Jasminer X4 1U miners described here and that is to take into account the one other thing that generates heat inside the miner. That is the controller chip on the miner’s control board that normally does not come with a cooling heatsink on top of it. The Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC (XA7Z020) used is not a traditional FPGA like we kind of assumed without properly checking the specs of the chip. It is in fact a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 Application Processor Unit (APU), and as you know having a processor, even a lower power ARM one can get things hot when operating and under load 24/7…

So, what apparently happened during the night, with no one present around the miner is the control board of the Jasminer X4 1U that we were using for testing just dying on us for no apparent reason. The only thing that comes to mind is the chip overheating for some reason and dying on us, although the normal operating temperature does not seem to suggest any overheating issues. Normally, when the miner is in its original package inside the 1U box with all the high-rpm server fans the inside ambient temperature is probably lower and thus no additional cooling has been provided for the controller board’s processor, but when you open it up and modify it to use silent fans things might become different. Thankfully we’ve had a spare controller board already ordered just in case something like that happened, so we replaced it immediately and the miner continued to function like before.

We’ve measure the operating temperature of the Zynq APU on the new controller board and it is nowhere near dangerous levels for such chips, at around 52 degrees Celsius (125.6 F) it should be pretty much safe even without extra cooling, right. Well, it might be now, but if what for some reason this temp rises for a while, probably that is what happened for some reason with the APU getting higher load for a longer period of time resulting in overheating (thouhg it could also be some totally unreleated reason as well, can’t be sure). Just to be on the safe side, it is a good idea to add a small memory chip cooler on top of the Zynq APU in order to keep the operating temperature lower at all times. Especially if you plan on using a silent modified miner and the the standard configuration where the issue could be less prone to appear.

Also, a good advice might be to order a spare controller board just in case, especially if you are running more than just a single Jasminer X4 1U ASIC miner. This is to avoid possible downtime in case something happens with the controller board on your miner. Do note that you can connect multiple hashing boards with Jasminer X4 ASICs to a single control board (our both had 3 connectors for hash board), though we’ve seen board with more connectors as well. We’ve tried and the control board detects and functions with a hashing board connected to all of the three available ports. So, as a temporary solution you might use a single control board to drive multiple hashboards of multiple miners in case you have more than juts one and you get a dead controller board.


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