[Blockchain Hardware Alliance] Bitcoin Miner S9, the Strongest Disassembly Report on the Internet

Because of Bernstein’s report, Bitmain, which has been making a fortune in silence, became known to the public.

According to CNBC, assuming a conservative estimate of 75% gross profit margin and 65% operating profit margin, Bernstein said Bitmain's operating profit in 2017 was $3 billion to $4 billion; during the same period, chip manufacturing giant Nvidia's operating profit was $3 billion, at the lower end of the aforementioned range. It took Nvidia 24 years to get to this point, while Bitmain only took 4 years, Bernstein said.

If the above estimate is accurate, based on the exchange rate at the time of this article’s publication (March 2), Bitmain’s operating profit in 2017 was between 19 billion yuan and 25.4 billion yuan. If blockchain and virtual assets also fall into the category of financial technology, Ant Financial, which is recognized as a Chinese financial technology giant, had a pre-tax profit of 13.189 billion yuan in 2017, which pales in comparison to Bitmain, not to mention the cash loan companies that were previously considered to have huge profits.

However, Bitmain told the media that Bernstein's estimate was incorrect, and said that its operating income in 2017 was about US$2.5 billion (about RMB 15.9 billion). Even so, Bitmain has become a wealth empire that cannot be ignored.

Without commenting on who is right or wrong between Bitmain and the media, as people who only care about chips, we just want to know what chips they use.

After searching the entire Internet, I still couldn't find a detailed chip-level disassembly report. I decided to do it myself, so I went to SEG next door and bought Bitmain's most popular Antminer S9 and disassembled it thoroughly. Now, welcome to follow us to see the most detailed disassembly report of Bitmain's most popular mining machine on the entire Internet, including: the most complete disassembly high-definition full picture, disassembly analysis report, and mining revenue calculation.

The most complete disassembly HD full picture

Antminer S9 main components: control board + computing board + power supply

Antminer S9 control board

Antminer S9 control board disassembly

Antminer S9 hashboard

There are 3 hash boards under the 3 red and white lines, which can be expanded to 9 at most.

Antminer S9 hashboard front

Under the densely packed heat sinks are

ASIC mining chips that quickly made Bitmain the second largest chip design company in China

Each hashboard carries 63 ASIC chips

The back of the Antminer S9 hashboard

The heat sink on the back and the front are different in height and material and have been specially processed.

The hashboard and ASIC chip after removing the heat sink

After we removed all the heat sinks, the ASIC chip was fully exposed.

Come closer

Official power supply for Bitmain S9

Bitmain S9 official power supply disassembly

Disassembly Analysis Report

The control board of this machine adopts the latest Xilinx Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC platform based on 28nm process flow. The Zynq-7010 is selected as the processor to tightly integrate the ARM processor and FPGA architecture. The unit has the high performance and low power consumption characteristics of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore (667M), which well meets the needs of the machine. The following is the functional structure diagram of the control board of this machine:

From the block diagram above, we can see that the main control board is equipped with serial port, network port, TF card and other interfaces, and supports output expansion (a total of 9 computing boards can be connected).

Design advantages:

From the BOM list and PCBA, we can see that the control circuit was designed with detailed considerations:

The functional expansion of the product is well considered during the design of the control board circuit. This control board can support driving 9 computing boards.

The computing board chips are all powered independently, and each chip uses a discrete heat sink for heat dissipation.

The material packaging used in the design is relatively universal, without special-shaped parts. The material brand quality is stable, and the control board power DC-DC chip uses TI chip. In the DDR Power loop design, TI's industrial-grade product TPS51200 is used to match VTT, which better guarantees the signal quality.

The connectors on the movement boards all use locking sockets to prevent the cables from loosening during transportation/use of the machine.

When laying out the PCB for the whole machine, the design rules were followed well: components cannot be placed within 5mm of the mark point (refer to the red illustration in the physical figure 1 below); SMT components are placed in a relatively regular manner without special angles, and SMT manufacturing efficiency is high; impedance matching design is done for ETH/DDR and other loops to ensure signal integrity. The Power/GND network reference layer is relatively complete; the functional chip layout is reasonable, the PCB shape is square, and the utilization rate is high.

Design deficiencies:

The safety distance was not ensured during the PCB LAYOUT of some circuits on the power board.

The TF card holder and the S2 button do not maintain a normal distance, which is not conducive to DIP plug-in manufacturing and after-sales maintenance.

The NAND FLASH body of the control board is far away from its power supply chip, passing through the middle of the ETH and SOC. From the design rule point of view, it is more appropriate to place it close to the FLASH (refer to the yellow diagram in the actual figure 1 below).

No DIP flow direction indicator is added during PCB LAYOUT, and no solder mask silk screen is added to the ETH socket and fan sockets FAN1~FAN6. It is easy to tin when passing through wave soldering (refer to the red diagram in the following physical figure 2)

PCBA costs are relatively high. In terms of chip selection, TI DC-DC products can use MPS or Taiwan GMT (GMT) series products to reduce costs.

Mining Revenue Analysis

According to the current currency price, machine price, computing power

The electricity fee is 0.5 cents, and the investment will be recovered in 10 and a half months.