Mining 101 – Mining Hardware - FPGA

FPGA : This is an acronym for field-programmable gate array. Not such a sexy name, so FPGA rolls a lot better off the tongue. What makes an FPGA so interesting, is the fact they have RAM blocks to implement complex digital computations. In layman terms, this means they are very well equipped for mining cryptocurrency.


FPGA’s were the next evolutionary step in mining SHA-256 coins. Packing a lot more punch than a regular GPU, FPGA’s could rival the mining speed of GPU farms, at a fraction of the power cost. As we discussed yesterday, an average GPU draws between 150 & 300W for mining, whereas a FPGA could increase hashing speed tenfold, and the power consumption would be about 25% of a GPU farm’s power consumption.

For those of you interested in a little history lesson, we’ll take a look at some of the FPGA models which paved the way for a new generation of hardware :

- Xilinx Spartan6-150 : These boards achieved a mining speed of about 200 to 220 MH/s per chip, and were priced competitively (at that time) at around $1 to $2.50 per MH/s.

- Icarus FPGA boards : An Icarus FPGA generates about ~360MH/s hashing power, with a 19.5W power consumption. .

800px-Icarus_Front

- Altera FPGA : Produced and used by Butterfly Labs, a company we’ll discuss a bit more later on in the ‘ASIC’ section of the article. Butterfly Labs sold their dual-FPGA 830 MH/s Single units for the very aggressive price of $600 (less than 75 cents per MH/s).

- ZTEX USB-FPGA Module 1.15y : This unit consists of four Spartan 6 XC6SLX150 FPGA’s , netting you a 860 MH/s hashing speed (on average).

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

- Butterfly Labs miniRig : a 25.2 GH/s mining device consisting of 17/18 boards with two Altera FPGAs each. The Altera FPGAs on the miniRig’s boards were more expensive chips than the ones on the Single’s board, operating between 650 and 750 MH/s each. These chips were known to cause a wide fluctuation in mining speeds, which many customers weren’t exactly thrilled with.

As you are all aware, technology is evolving at a very rapid pace over the last decade. This evolution also lead to some new developments in the crypto hardware world, and the application-specific integrated circuit ,or simply ASIC, was born.

The chip development resulted in smaller and smaller chips, meaning a lot more chips could be placed on a single mining board. This created many new possiblities, as several companies rivaled each other to bring out their ASIC devices for the SHA-256 mining community :

- Avalon : Avalon is the ASIC-based successor of the aforementioned FPGA-based Icarus device. The ASIC is a small, single-core, 110 nm chip. An Avalon rig consists of several hundred chips and achieves a hash rate of approximately 66 GH/s.

- Butterfly Labs : Several ASIC-based devices were announced : a 60 GH/s “SC Single”, as well as a 4.5 GH/s low-end product called “Jalapeno”, and a 1,500 GH/s high-end product called the “SC miniRig”.

In order not to jeopardize ongoing sales of FPGA-based mining devices, Butterfly Labs offered a trade-in-program where, upon the return of a BFL FPGA-based device, a customer would receive a full trade-in refund for a ASIC device purchase of twice the price, thus saving 50% of the ASIC-device’s purchase price.

- ASICminer : A few different devices have sprung forth from this company : a USB Block Eruptor, running at 300-330 MH/s and the Block Eruptor Blade , running at ~10GH/s each, are the most well-known devices from ASICminer.

Unfortunately, several of the companies mentioned above, as well as other companies have gotten some bad press lately because of delivery issues. The goal of this article is NOT to address or discuss this situation. More information about the delivery status of ASIC devices can be found on the BitcoinTalk Forums.

source: http://majesti.co/cryptonerd/mining-lingo-101-mining-hardware-part-1b/

Guugll Search

http://www.guugll.eu/mining-101-mining-hardware-fpga/