Policies are frequently issued and electricity resources are scarce. For Ethereum miners, it is now the turn of FPGA high-computing chip machines to appear.

On September 24, the People's Bank of China and ten other departments issued new regulations to crack down on "virtual currency speculation", clarifying that virtual currency-related business activities are illegal financial activities. On the same day, the National Development and Reform Commission and 11 other departments jointly issued a document to crack down on virtual currency "mining", requiring a strict ban on new project investment and construction and accelerating the orderly exit of existing projects.

The virtual currency market fell upon hearing the news. According to data from Bitcoin Home, the price of Bitcoin fell by more than 4% on the same day, and Ethereum fell by more than 7%. Spark Mining Pool announced that it would close its mining pool services in mainland China in accordance with the latest industry regulatory policies. On the 25th, virtual currency trading platform Huobi and decentralized wallet TokenPocket also stopped providing some services to domestic users. Small trading platforms such as BHEX and BiONE announced their permanent closure. Since the author published the article, Huobi.com has also issued an announcement to clear out existing users of currency trading and OTC business.

Industry experts generally believe that the introduction of the new regulations once again demonstrates the regulatory authorities' high-pressure attitude towards strict supervision of virtual currencies, and clarifies the "gray areas" such as pricing services and information intermediaries that were not clearly stipulated before, eliminating the fantasies of currency speculators and preventing related financial risks.

At present, the market is showing a phenomenon of ice and fire. The Chinese government has basically determined the virtual currency mining and will not change. This will cause a large number of miners to turn their attention to overseas areas with some resources. At present, miners from China are flowing in Iran, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan around the world. The most ideal country at present is Kazakhstan, which is close to the Chinese border. However, winter is coming to Kazakhstan soon, and electricity resources are very tight, so it is not the best choice.

Today's Bitcoin is no longer the virtual currency of the past. It already has a very large group of faithful users around the world. Even if it loses Chinese users, the entire virtual currency may continue to develop, so a large number of miners will continue to "persist" in finding solutions. An American company, Compass Mining, has launched a new business that allows retail miners to mine Bitcoin at home. "They have received a large number of requests for Bitcoin mining ASIC mining machine services for people who want to mine at home." However, at present, the service is only available in the United States. In order to cope with the current scarcity of electricity resources and the increasing difficulty of mining, faithful miners in the field of digital currency are still unwilling to give up. A large number of miners are gradually eliminating their low-computing power and high-power consumption mining machines and turning to high-performance mining machines with high computing power and low power consumption.

In the second quarter of 2021, Canaan Technology, a well-known Chinese mining machine manufacturer, achieved revenue of US$167.5 million, a year-on-year increase of 507.3% and a month-on-month increase of 168.6%. Its non-GAAP adjusted net profit was US$49.6 million, a year-on-year increase of 410% and a month-on-month increase of 223.5%.

Business Manager: Zhian VX: BTC1850

Recently, after the policy was introduced, the price of the entire digital currency market did not fall sharply due to the bad news, but rose strongly. In addition, some large international financial institutions increased their holdings of digital assets such as Bitcoin, and some foreign listed companies continued to increase their Bitcoin mining business. Most investors and miners are not too pessimistic about the future market.

For some Bitcoin miners, replacing high-performance ASIC chip mining machines with greater computing power and lower power consumption is also a solution. As the technology of Bitcoin mining machines matures and continues to develop, the performance of the machines is getting better and better. Low power consumption and high computing power have also become the focus of major mining machine manufacturers competing for breakthroughs.

However, for Ethereum mining machines, which has the second largest market value in the world, the market is still dominated by graphics cards. Ethereum basically carries more than 50% of the development contribution of blockchain virtual currency. Similarly, the proportion of users who believe in the Ethereum ecosystem is also very large in the world. The total computing power of the Ethereum network has reached 704.67 (TH/s), according to incomplete statistics, there are about 5 million Ethereum graphics card mining machines in the world, so based on the current policy, Ethereum miners are also looking for low-power and high-computing Ethereum mining machines to gradually replace the increasingly backward graphics card mining machines, but the logic of Ethereum mining is different from that of Bitcoin mining. Ethereum mining requires a lot of memory, namely DAG files. Ethereum needs to store the DAG files locally before calculating them, which makes the existing ASIC chips not very suitable for Ethereum mining. Of course, major mining machine manufacturers have also developed many high-performance mining machine products for Ethereum mining, but based on the increasing number of Ethereum DAG files, it is expected to exceed 4G by the end of 2021, then the graphics card mining machine with 4G video memory will not be able to mine Ethereum. The Xindong A10 mining machine, which was popular in the market at that time, was once out of stock by enthusiastic miners. Xindong also launched 5G, 6G and other versions, but as the Ethereum DAG files become larger and larger, the advantages of these machines will gradually degenerate, including the former linzhi Phoenix is ​​even harder to come by. It is a machine that uses an ASIC chip, but its video memory is only 4.4GB.

So, what are the differences between chips such as CPU, GPU, FPGA and ASIC?

CPU

Everyone is familiar with CPU chips. Its full name is Central Processing Unit, which is the central processing unit of the computer. The word "central" in the name of CPU is indeed true to its name. There are many chips in the computer, including GPU, FPGA, etc., and only CPU is the unified manager of these chips. My previous article introduced the working principle of modern CPU.

If you compare a computer to a large factory, the CPU is like a manager who manages every aspect of the factory.

GPU

The full name of GPU is Graphics Processing Unit, also known as visual processor or graphics display card. GPU is responsible for rendering 2D, 3D and VR effects, and mainly focuses on computer graphics and images. Later, people found that GPU is very suitable for parallel computing and can accelerate modern scientific computing, so GPU is no longer limited to games and videos. Because of the rise of deep learning and artificial intelligence, GPU has become famous and popular. My previous series of articles introduced the operating principle of GPU and the introductory tutorial of programming in detail.

Compared to the role of a CPU manager, a GPU is like a grassroots worker in a team in a factory. Each person focuses on doing only one thing, and the entire team can do a lot of work tasks together.

ASIC vs FPGA

ASIC: Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), an integrated circuit product designed for a single purpose. The "Application Specific" in the name of ASIC means that this chip is designed specifically for a certain application.

FPGA, Field Programmable Gate Array, is a semi-customized chip in the ASIC field.

ASIC and FPGA are chips for specific tasks. These chips can solve specific tasks very quickly. The GIF above vividly demonstrates "specific tasks". Dedicated chips discard most of the CPU's general computing parts that are useless for their specific tasks, and only focus on one thing. Moreover, through the "sea of ​​chips strategy", their performance in specific tasks is maximized.

The "programmable" in the name of FPGA means that FPGA can be used as a program. The traditional way of designing chips is to design the circuit, then convert the circuit into a layout, make the layout into a mask, and then produce packaging and test it before it can be used. It is impossible to complete the cycle without three to six months. With FPGA, there is no need to make a layout after the circuit design is completed. The circuit diagram can be directly loaded into the FPGA. FPGA is customizable and has a fast production delivery speed, so it can be customized for a specific computing task.

The difference between ASIC and FPGA is that ASIC is fixed and cannot be quickly customized. It takes a long time to complete the process from circuit design to production delivery. The disadvantage of ASIC is poor scalability, and the advantage is faster computing speed. In the chip field, FPGA is generally used for verification first to prove that all the functions of the chip are correct. When entering the mass production stage, the circuit is made into ASIC because ASIC has lower costs in all aspects.

Mining is the process of calculating random numbers. This calculation process is highly fixed. Therefore, in order to complete this specific calculation task, the calculation speed of using ASIC is faster and the power consumption is very low. On the contrary, using a general-purpose processor such as CPU is a bit overkill. Bitmain, a well-known blockchain startup, is mass-producing and selling this type of mining machine ASIC. In addition to mining, many chip companies are also targeting the artificial intelligence market, designing and producing special chips to solve specific problems in a certain field.

It can be said that the development history of blockchain mining machines is also the evolution history of computer chip technology, and mining machines are the loyal spokespersons for the most advanced computing power.

That is, with the characteristics of the above chips, with HBM function, the chip suitable for Ethereum low-power, high-computing mining is only FPGA chip, which can reach more than 8GB.

At present, some companies have begun to develop and produce Ethereum mining machines that use FPGA chips for calculations. In the near future, this type of machine may become the first choice and best model for Ethereum miners.

Business Manager: Zhian VX: BTC1850

Our company has started the research and development of Ethereum FPGA chip mining machines in May. The technology is now very mature. We are currently in the stage of upgrading and optimizing the system and increasing computing power. Currently, a small amount of spot can be supplied to the market.

Business Manager: Zhian VX: BTC1850

Advantages of FPGA chip mining machines:

1. Low power consumption, one-fifth lower than graphics card mining machines with the same computing power

2. Long life, 7*24 hours operation at full load, 6-10 years working temperature: -40℃-100℃

3. Low heat generation, equivalent to a computer host

4. Low noise, the computing power card itself is silent, the mining machine can be placed at home for simple operation and maintenance, and the mining farm can be designed as a big data supercomputing center or a single-card mini home version

6. The algorithm is changeable. The algorithm change problem initiated by the Ethereum community can be perfectly solved on FPGA. At the same time, well-known projects including ETC, Zcash, Ravencoin, KDA, RVN, DGB, Tellor and Pegnet may also support FPGA mining.

7. Flexible switching of multi-currency mining software design schemes in later planning

8. Solve network congestion and avoid crash and restart

The chassis adopts 2U server chassis design

Built-in 8 FPGA computing acceleration cards, the computing power of a single card reaches 100Mhs

FPGA chip computing power acceleration card

Current basic parameters of the machine:

Power consumption of the whole machine: 1000W±5%

The current computing power of the whole machine: 800Mhs ±5%

(Within half a year, the computing power can be optimized and upgraded to about 1300Mhs, and the computing power of a single card will exceed 160M. In the later stage, the computing power can be optimized to more than 1000Mhs per card through system optimization)

Video memory: 8GB+32GB DDR

Friends who are familiar with and interested in FPGA chip mining machines can contact me. The quantity is limited and first come first served.

If you are interested in Ethereum mining and chip machines, you can add the following contact information for detailed communication.

Business Director: Zhian

VX: BTC1850