6 ms·

This is for mining or password cracking.

by kobeya 10y ago

varelse 10y ago
Sure, great, but if they could build this to support Deep Learning and renegade HPC, I suspect they could sell 10,000+ units/year on the down-low. That would be $10M in revenue, maybe twice that if it also worked with Macs. NVIDIA will do their worst to shut this down because it's a direct threat to DGX-1 running neural networks that aren't entirely communication-limited (long story), but if they could throw this together, I think they could make a great quick buck before the axe falls.
- minxomat 10y ago
  If you take a look at their clients, it's mostly massive companies that probably order large lots of OEM solutions. I don't think amfeltec needs the scale or rather isn't already at the scale you are talking about (margin, not turnover), by enterprise tax and support for OEM builds alone. The 4x splitters go for about $200. But if you want guaranteed compatibility (i.e. a full build), the price (and margin for them) will skyrocket.
- Unklejoe 10y ago
  How could Nvidia really shut them down? It seems like they're just selling PCIe switches. I could be missing something, but I don't see anything even remotely infringing about this.
angry_octet 10y ago
Both bitcoin and litecoin are both far faster on ASICs. CrytoNight (Monero) is designed to be harder for ASICs but it is early days, I would expect new chips to make a significant improvement over GPUs. Since the memory requirement is only a few MB there is no need for access to large memories or a PCIe bus, and they will continue using ethernet. https://bytecoin.org/blog/proof-of-work-part-2/ https://bytecoin.org/blog/proof-of-work-part-2/
- kobeya 10y ago
  There are many others that do not (yet) have ASIC implementations.
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    But does anyone use them? And do they use any schemes that are not (a) a basic hash, (b) some scrypt scheme? Any reason why you wouldn't just put 3 GPUs in a regular chassis and be done for a quarter of the price?
    - wolrah 10y ago
      > Any reason why you wouldn't just put 3 GPUs in a regular chassis and be done for a quarter of the price? Not a *coiner but I can guessL With most motherboards even 3 GPUs will require you to have the cards right up next to each other. This is not great for cooling, which is important when you have the GPUs cranking away at full bore. Also you can only get 4 GPUs at max in to a normal size PC case. With these you can have a single host PC running 16+ GPUs.

This is for mining or password cracking.

by kobeya 10y ago

This is for mining or password cracking.

Sure, great, but if they could build this to support Deep Learning and renegade HPC, I suspect they could sell 10,000+ units/year on the down-low. That would be $10M in revenue, maybe twice that if it also worked with Macs. NVIDIA will do their worst to shut this down because it's a direct threat to DGX-1 running neural networks that aren't entirely communication-limited (long story), but if they could throw this together, I think they could make a great quick buck before the axe falls.

minxomat 10y ago
If you take a look at their clients, it's mostly massive companies that probably order large lots of OEM solutions. I don't think amfeltec needs the scale or rather isn't already at the scale you are talking about (margin, not turnover), by enterprise tax and support for OEM builds alone. The 4x splitters go for about $200. But if you want guaranteed compatibility (i.e. a full build), the price (and margin for them) will skyrocket.
Unklejoe 10y ago
How could Nvidia really shut them down? It seems like they're just selling PCIe switches. I could be missing something, but I don't see anything even remotely infringing about this.

angry_octet 10y ago

Both bitcoin and litecoin are both far faster on ASICs. CrytoNight (Monero) is designed to be harder for ASICs but it is early days, I would expect new chips to make a significant improvement over GPUs. Since the memory requirement is only a few MB there is no need for access to large memories or a PCIe bus, and they will continue using ethernet. https://bytecoin.org/blog/proof-of-work-part-2/ https://bytecoin.org/blog/proof-of-work-part-2/

kobeya 10y ago
There are many others that do not (yet) have ASIC implementations.
- angry_octet 10y ago
  But does anyone use them? And do they use any schemes that are not (a) a basic hash, (b) some scrypt scheme? Any reason why you wouldn't just put 3 GPUs in a regular chassis and be done for a quarter of the price?
  - wolrah 10y ago
    > Any reason why you wouldn't just put 3 GPUs in a regular chassis and be done for a quarter of the price? Not a *coiner but I can guessL With most motherboards even 3 GPUs will require you to have the cards right up next to each other. This is not great for cooling, which is important when you have the GPUs cranking away at full bore. Also you can only get 4 GPUs at max in to a normal size PC case. With these you can have a single host PC running 16+ GPUs.