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Zeus Integrated Systems has released their weekly update and confirmed that they have shipped the first 500 ordered units to customers, though apparently many of these were picked by customers from China. The company should continue shipping the rest of the orders from the first batch and is already taking preorders for the next batch. Currently only Cyclone, Thunder and Lightning miners are apparently being shipped and the smallest Blizzard miners should also start shipping very soon. Our order for a single Blizzard miner still says Processing as a Status and we are going to be keeping you updated once it actually ships and when we receive it and do some testing on our own. So stay tuned for more information soon.
Meanwhile, Alpha Technology, another Scrypt ASIC manufacturer has sent requests to the customers that have preordered their Viper Scrypt Miners to send the rest of the payment as the company has requested only 30% initial deposit for preorders. This however does not include shipment as it should be paid additionally when the time for shipping the actual product is close. Previously Alpha Technology said the full payment needs to be paid 8-10 weeks before shipment and they now say they will be ready for July shipment, so that should mean end of July most likely. And while 90 MHS Scrypt ASIC seemed quite a lot just a few weeks ago, now Innosilicon A2-based Scrypt ASICs are already shipping and are prety much capable of providing this hashrate. And Even though A2 is still a bit more expensive than the Viper you will still be able to get it now and not wait two more months (if Alpha Technology keep their promise for shipping in July). We personally have not preordered anything from Alpha Technology and do not have plans for doing so for the moment.
– To read the latest update from ZeusMiner regarding the current status of shipping units…
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.
The company Zeus has released an update on their website about the current progress for the ZeusMiner Scrypt ASICs that they already promised to start shipping by the end of this month. They have just announced that they will be starting to ship the first 500 orders from May 20th to latest May 25th, so apparently they are a bit ahead of the previously announced schedule to start shipping by May 31st. Another interesting thing is that the company will be releasing the miners not pushed to the maximum and promises an update that will allow users to further increase the hashrate later on. Also the company has announced that they will give out a second free miner, one that is a level lower in the product line than the ordered by the customer, so only the Blizzard customers will not get a second free miner with their orders. There is also a not so good quality video published from the company’s assembly factory in Shenzhen, China that you can see embedded above. So far things are looking pretty good for Zeus and their ZeusMiners and the only problem we currently find is that they do not have an official distributor in Europe for example to make it easier to get their products as they will be shipped from China.
We have decided to order one of the smallest 1.2 MHS Blizzard ZeusMiners in order to be able to test it and publish our hands-on experience with the Zeus Scrypt ASIC chips that are also used in the bigger miners. There are two options to pay directly to ZeusMiner, with BTC/LTC via CoinPayments or with Direct Bank Transfer, obviously using coins would be easier and faster and with no extra taxes from the bank. The price of the small Blizzard ZeusMiner is $199 USD and the shipping we got to Europe was $53.98 USD, so pretty steep price for shipping a small package from China, unless express courier service is used. Our order number was #2054, so apparently a lot of people have ordered Zeus Scrypt ASIC miners already with the company close to start shipping the actual units. We’ll keep you updated how things progress with our order.
– To read the latest update from ZeusMiner regarding the current status of their operations…