Posts Tagged ‘ZCash ASIC miner’

Bitmain Has Announced Antminer Z9 40K Sol/s ASIC Miner for Equihash

16, Jul 2018

Move away Antminer Z9 Mini, Bitmain is starting to sell the “full” Antminer Z9 that will supposedly offer 40000 Sol/s for Equihash mining at 1150W of power usage with deliveries starting at the beginning of September and priced at $3319 USD (PSU is not included). For comparison the already available Antminer Z9 Mini offered just 10000 at about 250W of power usage. On the other hand there is also the Innosilicon A9 ZMaster Equihash ASIC Miner that offers 50 Ksol/s at just 620 Watts of power usage, but at three times higher price and currently out is of stock.

Bitmain is currently showing only a rendering of the new device, not an actual photo, but it seems like two slightly longer Z9 Minis stitched together (maybe an extra chip or to per board). We already know that the chips used in the Z9 Mini are overclocking pretty well, so two Z9 Minis can easily reach 30 KSol/s at maybe about 700 Watts and three overclocked units can go for as much as 45 KSol/s with just about a Kilowatt of power usage. Considering this and the fact that the device apparently only has 7 PCI-E power connectors (6 for ASIC boards and 1 for the control board) we can easily assume that Bitmain may have achieved the high power usage with less chips that are already overclocked quite a lot. If they did do just that the price of the new “more powerful” units may not be justified and you should not be expecting to see a lot of headroom for improving performance like on the Minis.

– For more information about the new Bitmain Antminer Z9 40K Sol/s ASIC Miner for Equihash…

Innosilicon A9 ZMaster 50 Ksol/s Equihash ASIC Miner

7, Jun 2018

Innosilicon has just announced their A9 ZMaster ASIC miner for the Equihash algorithm used by Zcash (ZEC) and other coins that is apparently capable of 50000 Sol/s with just 620W of power usage. This significantly outperforms the already announced Bitmain Antminer Z9 mini that should be offering 10 Ksol/s with 300W of power usage, but what makes us frown here is the price that Innosilicon wants to charge you for this device. The Innosilicon A9 ZMaster should cost $9999 USD with a PSU included even though the miner is apparently already available in limited quantity of 300 units with shipping scheduled to start on June 10th.

The A9 ZMaster is pretty expensive at least for batch 1, but apparently Innosilicon wants to beat Bitmain in releasing first a more powerful product, even in limited quantities and charging a pretty expensive price for the device. The second batch shipments are planned to start on August 15th, but by then the price should be significantly lower, especially considering that even Bitmain has already announced lower prices for its upcoming batches of the Z9 mini devices. Meanwhile we are probably soon going to see more ASIC manufacturers coming out with Equihash-based devices and this should further drive down prices, especially if there isn’t that much of a demand for the hardware with the current market conditions. The only problem with ASIC manufacturers trying to fuck up each other is that in the end the one often getting fucked up is usually the miner that buys one or the other of the devices…

Bitmain Has Announced Antminer Z9 mini ASIC Miner for Equihash

3, May 2018

We already knew this was coming, but ow it is official Bitmain’s Antminer Z9 mini for the Equihash mining algorithm used by ZCash (ZEC) and quite a few other crypto currencies is going to start shipping around 20-30th of June. Bitmain is taking pre-orders for these new ASIC miners for Equihash at $1999 USD without power supply and shipping cost and they are able to deliver 10000 Sol/s at 300W, so not that much faster compared to a powerful GPU mining rig, but at lower price and power usage… similar to what the upcoming Ethash ASIC miners from Bitmain are offering at the moment. One more mining algorithm is going to slowly move towards ASIC miners apparently, though for now it will remain viable to be mined with GPUs and may as well be in the near future as well… at least for a while.

It is interesting to see what will be the reaction from different crypto coins that use the Equihash mining algorithm including, but not limited to ZCash (ZEC) as the first one to introduce the algorithm and the largest in terms of network hashrate one using it at the moment. For instance Bitcoin Gold (BTG) apparently has plans to fork in order to remain ASIC resistant or at least it seems that way from their recent tweets. There are already quite a few more Equihash crypto coins out there and there will be a discussion on ASIC miners for Equihash for sure, the other interesting and important question however is if these Antminer Z9 minis are already produced and Bitmain is “testing” them before starting to ship them out to customers at the end of next month.

– More about the upcoming Bitmain Antminer Z9 mini ASIC Miner for the Equihash algorithm…


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