Posts Tagged ‘KnCMiner LTC ASIC

kncminer-scrypt-asic-upgrade

The Scrypt ASIC race continues as KnCMiner has just updated their Scrypt ASIC miners’ hashrate again, not long after their supposed main competitor Alpha Technology has also increased the hashrate of their Viper units. Now the KnCMiner Titan is supposed to come out with 400 MHS hashrate and the mini version should offer 200 MHS hashrate. KnC has also just announced they have finished with the tape out of their Scrypt ASIC chips, meaning that the design of the chips has been finalized and they can be sent for manufacturing. KnCMiner says they should be able to deliver in Q3 and since the tape out has been finalized at the start of this month a end of July for shipping still seems to be very optimistic and the more realistic time is August. KnCMiner has also announced that they have started accepting orders for a second batch of Scrypt ASIC miners that will be shipped abut a month later than the first batch, so an August/September probably. The Batch 2 miners are priced at $3795 USD for the Mini Titan and $6995 USD for the Titan without VAT.

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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.

kncminer-titan-scrypt-asic-device

Initially when the Titan Scrypt ASIC has been a announced earlier this month by KnCMiner they have said it would be 100 MHS in terms of hashrate as a guaranteed minimum, but now the company has just announced that they will guarantee a minimum of 250 MHS. The price of the device remains the same – $9995 USD without VAT and the shipping date remains Q2/Q3 with Q3 being more realistic. The company also offers the people that have preordered their upcoming Neptune SHA-256 ASIC to switch to the Titan Scrypt ASIC if they want to.

This new announcement definitely will make a serious difference when the company starts shipping the Titan Scrypt ASIC and it will end the era of GPU mining for Scrypt-based crypto currencies. The 250 MHS Titan Scrypt miner will be able to run on an 800-1000 watt power supply according to KnC, so you can safely say that Litecoin and other Scrypt crypto currencies are now really starting to go on the same road as BTC did a while ago. In ust a few months there will be no point in mining Scrypt cryptos with GPU, but GPU miners will not just stop mining or disappear, they will just move to coins using other different crypto algorithms that will be ASIC proof for now just like LTC was.

Meanwhile the only company that currently ships ASIC devices capable of mining Scrypt cryto currencies is Gridseed and their products are selling a lot. But even these devices may not be so attractive in the second half of the year when we start seeing hundreds of MHS worth of Scryt ASICs getting added to the network hashrate. The good news is that if you get these ASIC devices now you have a very good chance to not only get your investment back, but also to make some good profit.


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