Crypto Mining Blog

The SF100 Dual-Miner ASICs from SFARDS are expected to start arriving in mid-August 2015 to the most eager miners that have ordered some fromt he first batch of devices, or at least that is what the manufacturer is claiming on their website. The SF100 BTC and LTC Dual Miner has been listed briefly on the official SFARDS website with a price of 8000 RMB (about 1288 USD) last month and is since labeled as Out of Stock. This price however seems to be for larger quantities, some other websites have since listed single units of the SFARDS SF100 miners for pre-order and their prices are for example $1699 USD on AliExpress, ~$1700 USD on Asic Trade and $1999.99 USD on ZoomHash or with other words significantly higher than what was listed on the official website. Note that these prices are for the ASIC miner only and you need to add the shipping cost, extra import taxes and then you would also need at least good 1KW power supply for the miner, so the total price will easy go over $2000 USD. Even if these prices are higher because of the limited number of available units in the first batch they are way too expensive to consider them as a good investment with the current market conditions. Not to mention that we are yet to see if the miners will be able to perform as promised by the manufacturers in terms of performance for both mining SHA256 and Scrypt algorithms separately and at the same time. Another thing that may not be very much in favor of the late availability of the SF100 miners is the expected Litecoin Block Reward Halving from 50 to 25 coins by the end of August…

SFARDS Technology has successfully developed and produced the first FD-SOI 28nm SHA-256 (Bitcoin) and Scrypt (Litecoin) dual-mode mining chip SF3301, as we have previously reported. After more than one month evaluating, prototyping, and extreme-condition pressure testing, the first 28nm dual-mode miner, SFARDS SF100 is about to start mass production.

SF100 dual-mode miner has 24 SF3301 chips that support the following modes:
1. Dual mining mode, Bitcoin hashing power 1700 GHS + Litecoin hashing power 47 MHS, the power consumption at wall of whole miner is 960W.
2. Bitcoin single mining mode: Hashing power 1700 GHS, power consumption 770W.
3. Litecoin single mining mode: Hashing power 47 MHS, power consumption 180W.

With 0.45W/GHS + 3.8W/MHS, the power efficiency of SF100 is showing really good potential. It is also possible to overclock to certain extent (Sha-256: 2 THS, Scrypt: 55 MHS). Based on recent Bitcoin and Litecoin price, a dual-mode SF100’s revenue is similat to that of a to a 2.8-3.2 THS pure Bitcoin miner, which makes it equivalent to 0.3-0.34W/GHS power efficiency when it is dual mining. Taking June 19th price for instance, one SF100 generates 4.2 USD from Bitcoin and 3.8 USD from Litecoin, or a total 8 USD per day (without the costs for electricity deducted).

SFARDS Technology will start selling the SF100 dual-miner to public in July, though there is still no official end-user price announced and the first batch quantity is limited. The SF3301 dual-miner ASIC chips will be available for sale on August to people interested in using them in their own miner designs, again no pricing has been announced yet.