There will be an ASIC AMA in next Governance meeting

Governance
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Quote from @gary at Agenda: Governance, Aug 11 2020 · Issue #328 · mimblewimble/grin-pm · GitHub

Currently the AR(ASIC Resistant) PoW has come to 20% ratio, and will gradually decrease to 0% at that day (about 5 months later), then Grin will completely be AT(ASIC Target) PoW. This is the sticky plan in Grin, eventually Grin will be 100% ASIC friendly.

Since the very beginning of Grin mainnet launching, some news of Grin ASIC miner come from time to time, we can find one summary here(Grin ASIC Miner Summary and ROI Estimation) in forum. But time proves that most of them didn’t become a real product, cancelled for this or that reason, including Obelisk and Innosilicon 's miner.

Concerning the last one I knew for Grin ASIC miner, I contact with Thomas of Vidtoo Inc. and it seems that things are in good progress there. So, after a discussion with some community members and Thomas, I feel it will be better to invite them to join this governance meeting, then any concerns and questions can be asked to them directly.

So, could you please add one agenda item about this? thanks, prefer it as the 1st topic in the meeting because of the timezone reason, time will be very late for Thomas and his colleagues.

At this time, Thomas Hu and Kevin Shao have confirmed to join this online governance meeting.
btw, Thomas is GM of Vidtoo Inc., Kevin Shao is the GM of blockchain business group of Canaan Inc. Vidtoo could be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canaan.

Regarding the questions to them, not limited but at least I saw some from the forum or group chat:

  1. There’s no evidence of ASIC mining on Grin yet, no bump in graphrate, so we wonder what became of these G1 miners. And some people reported that the original news of G1 miner in WeChat had been deleted.
  2. Who is behind G1 miner?
  3. Will the asic and/or miner be on a public sale and whether there is an estimated price already? And will it be available for sale to the north american public?
  4. Anything about production numbers?

Those interested are welcome to participate and/or ask questions in thread below.

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Feel free to start listing some questions here that you wish to see answered in the meeting.

I want to ask if they can confirm that each chip has roughly
64 GB of on-chip SRAM for node bitmaps,
512 MB of external RAM (HBM(2) ?!) for the edge bitmap,
and is using an 8x TMTO lean solver.

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That’s great that Thomas Hu and Kevin Shao from the Asics company Vidtoo are going to make an AMA at the governance meeting. Kuddos to @gary, @lehnberg and Vidtoo company.

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Thats a good start! Things getting cozy here ))

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  1. hashrate, power consumption, configuration, price

  2. Current ASIC computing power scale: how many machines have been delivered

  3. What is the production capacity and the expected scale of the mining machine market by the end of the year

  4. Second-generation R&D status, delivery time

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Country of origin for manufacture? Curious if US customers will have to pay 27.6% tarrifs.

Edit: Also, what kind of performance increase do they expect for second gen products? I presume these are built in 7nm?

Will eventual 5nm bring order of magnitude increase in performance or the typical 15-30% that a node shrink would suggest?

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A few questions from me as I can not attend:

  • Are there any price ranges leaks as of now?
  • ETA of a normal user being able to buy ?
  • Are you planning on pre-mining before selling the products?
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  1. Performance？Parameters in the same way as plan?
  2. When? When can I get the G1 miner?
  3. Pre-mining? As the first ASIC miner, pre-mining has a huge effect .
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Transcript from the AMA is now available here: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin-pm/blob/master/notes/20200811-meeting-governance.md#6-grin--asics-ama-with-thomas-and-kevin-from-vidtoo--canaan--bitrise-capital

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I hope all works out and we get a viable ASIC. Just a quick read from the dev meeting seemed flakey. I wonder who the “customers” actually are. :space_invader:

Macker

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Now available for the low low price of $35500 !

Stated production capacity is 100K. If they sell that many, then each one will make (assuming free electricity) ~ 12M$ / 100K = $120 per year. If they only sell 1K, that goes up to $12K per year…

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Ok many people have been complaining and gave bad reviews about this company Dovina. They have been selling all the existing and non existing Asics on alibaba No.1- Miners, No.1- Miners direct from Shenzhen Dovina Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. in CN
kindly cross check I am not sure… :thinking:

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I read the transcript and the questions re customers and availability of miners or website were all ignored… why?

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that’s all speculative price wise - I always wondered how these resellers price their margins since ROI or pricing standards are pretty much not a metric for pricing asics. popcorn in hand till some official source of the brand ipollo reveals itself and is confirmed lol…