Grin Improvement Proposal 1: put later phase outs on hold and rephrase primary PoW commitment

[asic_king]

@Taek

I am in favor of this, but also have another question. In the original commitment post, it was suggested that CC31 phase-out might be delayed if CC32 ASICs were not fast enough, but no formal bound was put on as a speed requirement. I think we should clear that up as well, because slow ASICs exacerbate selfish mining and cause issues with non-progress-free PoW.

A natural requirement to me would seem that CC32 ASICs should be able to do CC32 faster than a 2080ti can do CC31. That is, a single chip or instance of CC32 on a mining rig should be capable of doing at least 2 graphs per second.

This requirement of 2 graphs per second is rather low even by your own standard.

@Taek

Obelisk’s current roadmap includes both a CC31 miner in October, and a single-die CC32 miner in April. Similar to the performance difference between the Antminer S7 and the Antminer S9 (both TSMC 16nm products), we expect computational speed and efficiency to roughly double. Because CC32 is more computationally complex, these things cancel out. Our internal target for our CC32 miner is 200 graphs per second at 1000 watts.

Per my calculation, your single chip approach to have 1GiB of SRAM will have >50W per chip. So 1000W/50W=20 Chips for 200 Graphs or at least 10 Graphs per chip/instance. So your proposed requirement seem to contradict your own spec. I think your plan of doing a CC31 only miner is not a good plan aside from any technical risks. It puts your buyer at rather high risk of not able to even recover their principal investment. Both Single-chip and Multiple-chip approaches should all try to achieve a balance between compatibility and performance. I believe in the best interest of your investors Obelisk should take CC32 compatibility into account on GRIN1.
http://www.innosilicon.com/html/grin-miner/index.html
Here is a link to our solution. Not only is it CC31/32 compatible, the power consumption is only around 500W and the Graph per Second number will blow you away. I want to let you know that instead of spending all the effort doing audit and finger crossing, Innosilicon has an open ASIC model and welcome collaboration from Obelisk and other members of the community. You can use our ASICs to build your machine and we have a proven track record of delivering working ASICs on first silicon.