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The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

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Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#21

Post by jacquesm »

abakker wrote: post #16
simias wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGAs are worth it for anything that's too fast for software and is too niche for an ASIC. In my experience they are very popular for "pro tools" which are too specialized and don't have a large enough volume to justify creating an ASIC and are so expensive that the price of the BoM is not really a concern. For instance I work on products that do a lot of video processing on FPGAs (way too high bandwidth for software…

Bernie Meyers of IBM once told me that he believed FPGA would be the future of Moore's law. he felt strongly that they provided a performance and flexibility tradeoff that made them ideal for using in virtually all servers as coprocessors for certain functions. The fact that the FPGA code can be audited was a plus as well.

You can audit the FPGA code but good luck auditing the bitstream and those tools are all closed. Even for a small FPGA this would be quite a task.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#22

Post by simias »

abakker wrote: post #16
simias wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGAs are worth it for anything that's too fast for software and is too niche for an ASIC. In my experience they are very popular for "pro tools" which are too specialized and don't have a large enough volume to justify creating an ASIC and are so expensive that the price of the BoM is not really a concern. For instance I work on products that do a lot of video processing on FPGAs (way too high bandwidth for software…

Bernie Meyers of IBM once told me that he believed FPGA would be the future of Moore's law. he felt strongly that they provided a performance and flexibility tradeoff that made them ideal for using in virtually all servers as coprocessors for certain functions. The fact that the FPGA code can be audited was a plus as well.

I'm curious about what Intel will do now that they own Altera. Maybe they'll be able to push FPGA technology into mainstream CPUs.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#23

Post by maehwasu »

tw1010 wrote: post #5

Amazing what innovations naturally spring out from nothing once the incentives are in place.

If you replace "innovations" with "behaviors" you're on to something.

OP is catching flak for the comment, but Filecoin and others are doing cool things exploring the possibilities of using incentives to drive massive resource re-allocations.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#24

Post by lnsru »

simias wrote: post #22
abakker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bernie Meyers of IBM once told me that he believed FPGA would be the future of Moore's law. he felt strongly that they provided a performance and flexibility tradeoff that made them ideal for using in virtually all servers as coprocessors for certain functions. The fact that the FPGA code can be audited was a plus as well.

I'm curious about what Intel will do now that they own Altera. Maybe they'll be able to push FPGA technology into mainstream CPUs.

Not sure about economics, but separate PCIe card with FPGA and it’s own storage is not that hard to build. Such setup could accelerate big data operations for sure.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#25

Post by mrb »

simias wrote: post #14
tw1010 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bias is making you more unfair than you need to be.

I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that. Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.

It took much less money than that to develop the first Bitcoin ASICs.

~150k USD for 130nm, 200-300k USD for 110nm, and ~500k USD for 65nm, as of 2013 http://blog.zorinaq.com/asic-development-costs-are-lower-tha...

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#26

Post by vel0city »

lnsru wrote: post #9

Nice history of money printing machines. Very nice and very easy FPGA application back then, just 2 sha256 pipes. Is there something worth pursuing nowadays for FPGAs? Machine learning?

I've heard Microsoft was deploying them like highly programmable dynamic network switches/adapters for Azure and also some applications for Bing.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/progr...

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#27

Post by jjoonathan »

simias wrote: post #13
lnsru wrote: post #9

Nice history of money printing machines. Very nice and very easy FPGA application back then, just 2 sha256 pipes. Is there something worth pursuing nowadays for FPGAs? Machine learning?

FPGAs are worth it for anything that's too fast for software and is too niche for an ASIC. In my experience they are very popular for "pro tools" which are too specialized and don't have a large enough volume to justify creating an ASIC and are so expensive that the price of the BoM is not really a concern. For instance I work on products that do a lot of video processing on FPGAs (way too high bandwidth for software…

I've never actually priced out an application where FPGAs were competitive on raw compute power -- GPUs have always smoked them for the tasks I was interested in, and not by a small margin. We only ever used them because they were "hardware engineer duct-tape" -- they let us talk to chips, network, and system busses at high bandwidth / pin count. Real time pipelines were a bonus but memory and compute were so much cheaper on computers that buffers + overprovisioning were a much more attractive real time solution wherever the logistics weren't prohibitive. Often they were, though, forcing us to use FPGAs for compute even though they weren't particularly good at it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a more general truth and that in many applications where FPGAs are touted as compute accelerators they were actually chosen to minimize the length of the critical real-time data path rather than to do more computation for fewer dollars.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#28

Post by phil21 »

simias wrote: post #14
tw1010 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bias is making you more unfair than you need to be.

I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that. Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.

The "innovation" here obviously isn't in the "cutting edge technology that moves the state of the art forward" at all.

The innovation at the time was that the conventional wisdom that it's "effectively impossible" to do small custom ASIC runs for relatively cheap. Most were laughed at back then when this topic was brought up for other use cases.

While I'm sure none of that was super exciting to someone who works on custom ASIC design for some enterprise, it was pretty neat watching effectively a bunch of hackers figure the process out and do it for a tenth of the predicted "first chip" costs. This has a lot of value in of itself, simply proving something is possible for $a_lot_of_money+skill vs. $epic_truckloads_of_money.

Nowadays it's not super interesting since you're back to needing to be a "big player" to get into the game - but for a year or so it was a real fun time to be a bystander and watch the rapid pace of development.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#29

Post by jjoonathan »

abakker wrote: post #16
simias wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FPGAs are worth it for anything that's too fast for software and is too niche for an ASIC. In my experience they are very popular for "pro tools" which are too specialized and don't have a large enough volume to justify creating an ASIC and are so expensive that the price of the BoM is not really a concern. For instance I work on products that do a lot of video processing on FPGAs (way too high bandwidth for software…

Bernie Meyers of IBM once told me that he believed FPGA would be the future of Moore's law. he felt strongly that they provided a performance and flexibility tradeoff that made them ideal for using in virtually all servers as coprocessors for certain functions. The fact that the FPGA code can be audited was a plus as well.

FPGAs start from far, far behind on the performance end though (by a factor of several dozen). FPGA vendors compete to shift as much as they can out of configurable logic and into lithographically-defined IP blocks because of this severe disadvantage. A modern FPGA will be strewn with hardwired serial interfaces, memory controllers, CPU cores, and the like. Taking advantage of these is almost always a gigantic performance win, and that's assuming the functionality they provide is even possible in configurable logic (e.g. try implementing a 32Gbps serial port using only configurable 500MHz logic).

FPGAs don't trend towards openness and you have to get a 100x win from their flexibility to break even on performance.

Re: The Evolution of Bitcoin Hardware [pdf]

#30

Post by dragontamer »

mrb wrote: post #25
simias wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's being fair. The real difficulty in making an ASIC is justifying the huge price to start production. The good old "the first chip is worth $10 millions, the second is worth $5" or something like that. Designing a bitcoin mining IP is not exactly difficult, it's basically two rounds of SHA-256. It's still some work of course, but as far as ASICs are concerned it's very low on the difficulty scale.

It took much less money than that to develop the first Bitcoin ASICs. ~150k USD for 130nm, 200-300k USD for 110nm, and ~500k USD for 65nm, as of 2013 http://blog.zorinaq.com/asic-development-costs-are-lower-tha...

I doubt that 65nm would be able to beat a GPU (which are all 16nm class or better) at the task however. If you make an ASIC but if the $3000 Titan V is more power efficient anyway, then you've wasted your time and money.

65nm and other "old node" designs primarily are about mass-manufacturing a design. They probably can beat an FPGA in cost and margins once mass produced. But for performance and power-efficiency, you gotta be way better. Maybe 28nm or 22nm class or better to beat the GPUs (or even standard CPUs like EPYC and the SHA256 accelerators built into it)

Also, you gotta beat your competition. If someone else makes a 10nm-class BTC ASIC (https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/samsung-confirms-asic-chip...), then your 28nm or 22nm design is obsolete.

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