Posts Tagged ‘Scrypt ASIC

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-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…

litecoin-price-on-the-rise

The exchange price of Litecoin (LTC) is still on the rise with the alternative crypto currency already testing the $8 USD target and this has caused a lot of speculation about the reasons behind this recent rise. Some people say it could be due to the recent high load on the Bitcoin blockchain and transactions processing slow due to a lot of unconfirmed ones in the backlog. Other say the reason could be just another pump and dump scheme by a big player with a lot of coins. Another plausible possibility is due to the upcoming fist halving of the LTC reward at the end of August, or the unfavorable situation in Greece at the moment or that on the issues with the China stock markets and the list goes on and on…

Regardless of the reason behind the jump in the exchange rate it is already causing increased demand for Scrypt ASIC miners and services offering Scrypt cloud mining, however nowadays these are scarce and had to find. The best thing you can probably get at the moment is an Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC miner at a discounted price if you manage to find yourself a good deal for a SilverFish Scrypt Blade miner. With Bitmain Tech and ZeusMiner canceling their Scrypt ASIC projects last year (maybe they can restart them if the trend continues) and KnCMiner stopping to sell their Titan Scrypt ASICs and any other ASIC miners to end users there is just one new interesting option coming up. The new SFARDS SF100 Dual-Miner ASICs that are supposed to be available later this month, though SFARDS is still keeping silent about their pricing and expected availability is said to be July.

In the end it is good that we are finally seeing some movement surrounding LTC along with some other Scrypt crypto currencies as nothing much has been happening around Litecoin in the last few months, so the recent price jump and revived interest is definitely a good thing for people that are into altcoins. Especially now that Bitcoin mining is moving away from home miners and more and more towards large mining farms, whereas Scrypt mining is still at a phase where it is still focused mostly in the hands of small mining operations. So we are keeping a close eye on the development around Litecoin and so should you…


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