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.
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?
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
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.
It took several years, but here’s what you wanted and what I think a lot of miners have wanted a peek at. Here’s the hot slab of SRAM that makes the G1 mini run:
iPollo used pretty nice thermal pads, at least on this one. Will be replacing with arctic silver mx-6 since I’m hoping another power board for the miner can be sourced.
If that’s the main ASIC, then it’s not just SRAM but also a lot of siphash hashing units and the overall control logic. We still don’t have confirmation of the amount of SRAM and presence of DRAM outside of this chip (presumed 512MB for holding the edge bitmap).
