Chicken{1...4} are not running away - iPollo G1 mini - review and disassembly

I did only order iPollo G1 mini’s aka. iChicken's .

@mcn-mike thanks for the teardown and review.

If you do remove the heatsink, there’s some interesting information that one can infer from the chip. Please refer to my attachment showing the Radeon VII as an example. In particular, can you provide:

  1. the body (outer) size of the chip (length and height)
  2. the die size of the chip (length and height)
  3. the text markings on the frame
  4. quantity of HBM die

From the performance of the mini, I’m guessing there are 30 ASICs in the larger system, I get that from scaling performance and power. ie.

1.4 gps x 30 chips = 42 gps
100W x 30 chips = 3000W

Also I’m curious as to why the mini is named iChicken. This is somewhat reminiscent of the game ASIC vendors played with marketing Grin miners. All products were a mile off their announced spec or didn’t get released. I can go over the history but that’s not the point of my post.

In short, it was a game of chicken to see who would blink first. iPollo missed their spec. They took the conservative approach with external HBM memory and limited embedded memory and lots of TMTO. Not fastest or most elegant design, but they delivered a miner to the market. To that I’m happy for the Grin community.

It’s like the moral from Aesop fables which also applies to ASIC marketing for smaller networks, “The Turtoise and the Hare”.

You don’t have to be the fastest, you just have to cross the finish line first.

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@ePIC.ASIC

  1. the body (outer) size of the chip (length and height)
  2. the die size of the chip (length and height)
  3. the text markings on the frame
  4. quantity of HBM die

I will try my best, if you have any tips for me while disassembling it let me know. :+1:

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Mounting an SD card to iChicken

I successfully mounted a SD card to the iChicken operating system (OpenWRT)
This is nothing spectacular, but for someone it might be helpful as its straight forward.

prerequisites:

  • SD card 16GB (formatted FAT32)
    I did not try with different file system, as my experience told me usually all systems recognize fat32 formatted cards

  • SSH access to your iChicken
    default username / pass == admin / admin

  • one additional SSH session with logread -f which displays you the syslog logs.

From logread -f you should see something similar when inserting your SD card to this:

Wed Mar 10 17:51:54 2021 kern.warn kernel: [262575.551488] mmc0: host does not support reading read-only switch, assuming write-enable
Wed Mar 10 17:51:54 2021 kern.info kernel: [262575.565463] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address aaaa
Wed Mar 10 17:51:54 2021 kern.info kernel: [262575.572352] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SC16G 14.8 GiB
Wed Mar 10 17:51:54 2021 kern.info kernel: [262575.582073]  mmcblk0: p1
Wed Mar 10 17:51:56 2021 kern.info kernel: [262577.673136] mmc0: card aaaa removed
Wed Mar 10 17:51:57 2021 kern.warn kernel: [262578.991521] mmc0: host does not support reading read-only switch, assuming write-enable
Wed Mar 10 17:51:57 2021 kern.info kernel: [262579.005476] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address aaaa
Wed Mar 10 17:51:57 2021 kern.info kernel: [262579.011647] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SC16G 14.8 GiB
Wed Mar 10 17:51:57 2021 kern.info kernel: [262579.021869]  mmcblk0: p1

If you see something similar your iChicken successfully recognized the SD card.

We now create a mount point, which is just a folder on /mnt as follows:

mkdir /mnt/sd

verify if we created the folder with

ls -la /mnt/sd

drwxr-xr-x    3 admin    root          4096 Mar 10 17:59 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 admin    root             0 Mar 10 18:00 ..

Mounting SD card

we take the recognized name from the above log line and mount the device into /mnt/sd:

Wed Mar 10 17:51:57 2021 kern.info kernel: [262579.011647] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SC16G 14.8 GiB

mount /dev/mmcblk0 sd/

if you successful your logread -f will show you:

Wed Mar 10 18:12:55 2021 kern.info kernel: [263836.716440] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)

now check the directory and if you have access and write some files to it:

dmin@iHaehnchen04:/mnt/sd# ls -la
drwxr-xr-x    3 admin    root          4096 Mar 10 18:01 .
drwxr-xr-x    1 admin    root             0 Mar 10 18:00 ..
drwx------    2 admin    root         16384 Mar 10 17:59 lost+found
-rw-r--r--    1 admin    root             0 Mar 10 18:01 mike_from_grinnode.live

Have fun and please share your knowledge about iChicken here as well.

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I would like to ask you how to solve the problem that you have two G1 MINI mining machines that are not working properly.

I have not yet solved the problem with 2 - out of - 4 iChickens.
At the moment they running aprox. with 50% of the possible hash-rate.
I will update this post once I find a solution and if someone else finds a solution please post it here as well.

In reference to this please also check:

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If anyone is ever willing to sacrifice an iChicken to the silicon gods (n.b. it does not have to be functional at all; it can be partially or completely broken), there is a lot of information that can be gained by getting the chip professionally decapped and photographed.

For an example of what can be done at the hobbyist level:

From looking at these photos, one can extract information about the structure of the ASIC, the technology node it’s produced on, and even reverse-engineer a rough expected cost of the chip.

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Info from VoskCoin

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Good evening. Does the fan have a 2 pin output? Cooler speed not adjustable? Thanks in advance for your reply.

I’m not sure but it looks 4 pin. Each one of those connectors is a fan.

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If you use a 12v 12.5A 150w power supply, the cooler can be increased programmatically to avoid overheating.

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Thanks for the photo!

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Great photos!

If the black finned heatsink can be rotated 90 degrees, that would probably be a big win — the airflow would be directly down the fin channels instead of cross to them. I honestly wonder if this is a manufacturing defect. Could apply better thermal paste at the same time.


Also make sure that two of the fans are blowing in, and the other two are blowing out. This is cooling 101, but I’ve seen worse in real life…

Does it run cooler with the case removed?

It looks like the board is elevated a bit, so the plane of the board is at the midpoint of the fans? Is there anything on the bottom of the board that is taking up space? What’s under there?

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Sorry for the late reply.
Repositioning the fans dropped the temp from 96.4 ℃ to 56.1 ℃.
Yes, runs cooler with case removed.
Some screws were stripped so could not expose the bottom sorry.
I took a picture hoping it will help :slight_smile:

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Ahhhh, that makes much more sense — the ASICs are certainly under those monster heat sinks, which are oriented correctly.

Nice! How did you reposition the fans?

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I just flipped two of them so the air flows like your diagram. The fans originally came all facing out. Thank you for the tip!

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Hello. I did an experiment today. I connected emulators instead of fans. I am planning to use CRYSTAL PLUS 70T in immersion fluid. Later I will post a photo after the dive. Summer is coming, it will be very hot.

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Just connected to the G1 Mini using ssh port 22.
Was looking around and searching for the cgminer/asicboard frequency settings.

In /etc/init.d/cgminer file there are some settings saved like pwm for fan and pool adress.

Did someone figure out how to change the frequency of this little chicken?

Pretty sure it can be overwritten - just find the right screw.

Would like to do a slight increase to 1.4 Graphs per second since the temperature is far in the green area.

iPollo build some fork of cgminer, I saw with command cgminer --help there are some custom calls specific for G1 Mini. But also only for fan control.

Maybe it is possible to overwrite the gpio configs, some embedded dev here?