SKYNET BITCOIN MINER: ONLINE

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have been around for quite some time now and have seen wide deployment as a middle ground between utilizing an existing platform (ARM comes to mind) or investing to have a custom ASIC created. Since Bitcoin Mining has boomed, there has been whispers of a fabled “great FPGA grid” that was going to ruin the Mining marketplace and dominate the Bitcoin economy.

The problem is that FPGA’s are terribly inefficient. Let me explain why, then let you all in on a little secret.

The general idea behind FPGA in regards to Bitcoin Mining is that one could create hardware that is specific and dedicated to SHA-256 hashing and tailored for solving Bitcoin Blocks without the overhead of having to do anything else. So in theory, clock for clock a FPGA should be more efficient at solving SHA-256 hash problems then a general processor (x86 in this case). In addition to a clock for clock advantage, it would have a much lower power consumption when compared to general processors as well.

So what’s the problem?

The issue with Bitcoin Mining is that it’s all about being cost effective. Where as general processors have lower startup costs (dedicated ATI GPU’s for example) and higher operational costs due to power consumption, FPGA’s have a higher startup cost (~$60-$100 per chip currently at 100 Mhash/sec) with a lower operational cost, but how much lower?

Your top performing ATI Video Card consumes 375 watts and processes 750 Mhash/sec, compared to a Xilinx XC6VLX240T-1FFG1156 FPGA chip which can crank out 375 Mhash/sec while only sipping 16 watts. Sounds like an obvious choice, right? Did I mention that both the Xilinx FPGA and the ATI 6990 cost $1000?

So the question here becomes the same as when buying a Hybrid car: How long would it take you to recover the initial startup cost over time?

Using the Bitcoin Profitability Calculator over at bitcoinX.com, I crunched the numbers and here’s where we’re at (assuming $0.10 kw/h energy rate and difficulty doubling every 12 months):

6990 Break Even Point: 1 Year, 1 Month

FPGA Break Even Point: 2 Years, 7 Months

So the other end of the spectrum is developing a custom ASIC. This article over at Chip Design Magazine has a fantastic overview of why people would choose an ASIC vs. FPGA and vice versa. The Bitcoin specific part of this is that the Bitcoin system itself has a way of devaluing an investment over time by adjusting the difficulty so there’s a consistent number of blocks solved within a time frame. Currently, it seems it wants to keep things at ~5.5-6 blocks per hour.

This means that if someone were to invest in an ASIC computing grid that took over 90% of the Bitcoin network hash rate, all that would mean is that once the difficulty adjusts, they would get 90% of the 5.5-6 blocks per hour. So there’s a big, big disincentive for someone to make the investment in any dedicated hardware.

In the end, custom solutions are a perfect example of being Penny Wise and Pound Foolish.

So here’s the part where I let everyone in on a little secret: Ready?

Are you sure?

Ok, but don’t say I didnt warn you:

Modern GPU’s are (essentially) FPGA’s

Did I blow your mind? Do you need a minute?

What people seem to forget is that modern GPU’s are essentially FPGA’s in that you’re writing a program that will take advantage of a dedicated computing resource for which the management of allocation and assignment is abstracted out through the hardware.

ATI/AMD cards for example make extensive use of Stream Processors (or as they were once called, “Programmable Shaders“) which allows the equivalent of the FPGA ‘cores’ to be programmed and executed on the GPU.

So what we’re left with is a video card that is also essentially a FPGA that can execute custom programs in a massively parallel environment. And just like Alton Brown, I love a multitasker! So there’s absolutely no need for FPGA miners as they’ll never be cost effective and the alternatives yield much higher returns.

Cheers!

Just a quick update on the source code release for ApocBot!

I had nothing short of a complete meltdown over my holiday vacation while upgrading my PC. I won’t get into the details on why power supply manufacturers are evil for having modular cables that are keyed the same but are differently pinned (thus frying my hard drives), but needless to say it could be a blog post all on its own!

That being said, I’m back online now and getting back to finishing the code for release. I’ll post it here in a week or so once I get my VMs all set back up and finalize testing. Sorry for the delay

Cheers!

The available alternatives out there didn’t seem technically feasible as most D-Link and Linksys offerings are merely Windows Media Center Extenders with “support for MPEG-4/ASP” (read: DivX) but no support for MPEG-4/AVC or MPEG-4/VC1. The option of setting up another HTPC for my home theater wouldn’t be financially viable because at a base price of about $399 I might as well invest in a Blu-Ray burner to watch my backups.

Enter the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player…

Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player

While scouring the internets looking for solutions to my problem, I stumbled upon the recently released Western Digital Live HD Media Player. The specs fit the bill (and them some) for my technical expectations:

• VIDEO – AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG1/2/4), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG1/2/4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T (MPEG1/2/4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, h.264), M2TS, WMV9
• AUDIO – MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital, DTS

Throw in the fact that it supports 1080p over HDMI and is only, it seemed like a no brainer!

The device itself is small. Hilariously small actually. Imagine a small box of 3.5″ floppy disks (if anyone actually remembers those)

Now, my home network setup is unique to my situation. I have two Apple Airport Extreme base stations extending the same network. My NAS is attached to one base station in my office. The Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player is attached to another Apple Airport Extreme base station on my home theater. I knew going into this situation that bandwidth would be an issue as playback of h.264/MKV video is bandwidth intensive and can sometimes require upwards of 50mbps depending on the quality.

My initial testing after hooking up the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player showed that I was in fact having issues with wireless bandwidth from my Intel SS4200-E NAS to my home theater. The MKV playback of a 1080p MPEG-4/AVC video began stuttering and losing audio/video sync. I started to get disheartened because I thought my Apple Airport Extremes must have been connecting to each other at the highest possible speeds, right? Wrong.

Turns out I had room for improvement in my Wifi setup. I stumbled upon this blog post over on Engadget which talked about the speed differences between Apple’s 2.5Ghz “compatible” N and their 5Ghz modes. I checked my Apple Airport Extremes to see what my network was set at. You can do this by opening up the Airport Utility and selecting your primary base station. Under the wireless tab, you should be able to select your wireless mode.

Setting Apple Airport Extreme Radio Mode

After fiddling around with all the settings, I found that explicitly setting 802.11n with a 5Ghz radio frequency gave me much higher wifi throughput as I had previously running 802.11n in “b/g compatible” mode. The downside of this is not only 802.11n devices that support the 5ghz frequency are able to join my home network, meaning our iPhones are stuck to non-wifi mode while around the house.

Apple Airport Wirelss Setup for Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player

That aside, the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player was able to play back all of my 1080p HD content without slowdown or playback issues. It would seem from other reviews on forums and across the internet might be having networking issues if they’re having trouble during playback. Granted, I can’t speak for every method of encoding h.264 (between different profiles & containers, it’d be hard to do a comprehensive test), but I can say that my files which I encoded with x264 and saved in an MKV container playback perfectly!

I couldn’t be happier with the Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player and I haven’t had a single issue yet. It’s able to connect to my Intel SS4200-E NAS (both UPNP Media Server and SMB) and browsing files is a sinch. Part of me wishes the interface allowed for more interactive content, such as Media Browser does for Windows Media Center by automatically loading movie information and covers based on the file name. I suppose these features might come at a future time, as Western Digital has just released the first firmware update for the TV Live HD Media Player and they seem to be on track for the next release shortly.

The only drawback I’ve run into thus far is the inability to play WMV files, which I suspect might be a licensing issue… but who knows. It might be coming in a future firmware update as well!

Hope this helps someone out there in the same situation I was in! Please leave any questions you might have and I’ll be more than happy to answer!

Cheers!

The case I’ve been using is a Morex 3677B case, which is fairly small but still allows enough room for a 2.5″ Hard Drive and a Slim Laptop CD/DVD drive.

A couple gotchas I ran into while upgrading from the VIA board to the new Intel Atom based board:

1. The Zotac IONITX board has only SATA connectors, no PATA connectors to be found! This was a road block as both my previous hard drive and slim CD/DVD drive were both PATA so I was forced to upgrade them as well. Luckily I was able to score a 320GB Seagate drive for only $79!
2. Zotac provides a small 50mm fan to use on the heatsink because the Dual Core N330 CPU as well as the nVidia northbridge require active cooling. Luckily the Morex case has a 50mm exhaust fan that sits close to the heatsink. I was able to flip it around and use it to blow onto the CPU.
3. Speaking of the heatsink, it’s about 1.5″ high and ALMOST comes too close to not fitting into the case. So it’s something to keep in mind when you’re working on your setup!

I’ve got everything hooked up and it was very easy to get the driver package installed. Because the Zotac IONITX came out so recently, the CD it came with had the latest drivers and the motherboard had the latest BIOS installed.

The ONE issue I’m having and still searching for a solution for is that using HDMI as the audio output, I’m getting audio distortion. I’ve tried different source materials and even tweaking the audio settings, but it’s still happening. Other than that, I’ve been super pleased with it’s performance! I mean, seriously, a computer the size of a shoe box showing four CPU’s (2 physical + hyper threading) and an nVidia graphics adapter!

Hope this helps someone out there in the market for upgrading their own HTPC as well!

Cheers!

I’m currently running the CUDA client on two machines that have video cards that support the CUDA API. My home GeForce 8800GTX and my work Quadro FX 4600. From what I’ve read in specs and reviews, they’re basically the same card. So although this issue isn’t TECHNICALLY apples to apples, there might be a connection.

I noticed after a month or so of running the CUDA client on my home GeForce 8800GTX, my Vista machine started to become unstable. Blue Screening (BSOD) or rebooting randomly. It struck me as odd because I had not changed anything and for the most part, the system had just been sitting idle crunching work units.

Your GPU running SETI@home CUDA Client

After some basic trouble shooting I was able to determine that the instability was due to my video card overheating! This struck me as strange, because I know nVidia uses variable speed fans on the 8800GTX, so you’d think that if the system was reaching an unsafe operating level, that the fan would kick on, right? Wrong.

I ended up downloading RivaTuner which allows you to access low level functions (such as overclocking, and FAN CONTROL). Using RivaTuner, I manually setting my GPU fan to 100%. This keeps the average temp of my 8800GTX around 67-70C.

Which brings us to today when my work machine started showing the same symptoms. When I booted my machine, within 5 minutes of being on (with SETI@home running), it gave me a BSOD (with dxgkrnl.sys as the culprit). The system wouldn’t boot for a few minutes (returning BIOS beep codes) until the Quadro FX 4600 cooled down and the system booted again.

This time I disabled SETI@home as soon as I logged in and the system appeared stable. I installed SpeedFan to double check I was seeing the same issue. Low and behold, I start SETI@home and my GPU temp almost gets to 80 degrees Celsius before my system blue screens and reboots.

Repeating the same steps as with my home system, I use RivaTuner to force the Quadro FX 4600 to always keep the fan speed at 100% and this seems to fix the issue. My GPU temp currently sits at 67 degrees Celsius and my system appears to be stable (for the time being )

I’m curious if anyone else out there has had the same heat related issues when running CUDA applications on nVidia video cards. It seems that their automatic fan controls have logic issues when not running a 3D game (because when running one of those, it’ll hit leaf blower speeds).

It would seem to me that although the video cards had no issue keeping up with cooling over a short period of time, but over an extended period of time with the GPU being used 24-hours a day, the cooling solutions appears to fall behind. Is this caused by a physical change due to the constant heat/stress? Who knows!

Cheers!

My BOINC Stats

What are they not telling you? That the 40GB plan is $54.90! The comparable in price plan they’re offering to customers who currently subscribe to Road Runner standard for $29.95/mo? A paltry 5GB! That’s right! Time Warner Cable is going to be charging home users almost THIRTY DOLLARS per month for a pathetically small 5GB of data transfer. Don’t think the marketing genius stops there! In addition to these new ridiculous bandwidth caps, they’re going to be charging you $1 per gigabyte over!

To break down these numbers, I thought I’d throw out some AVERAGE usage from my household, who DOESN’T use P2P file sharing or sites such as The Pirate Bay:

Average Amazon Unbox video rental file size: 1GB

Average weekly Rock Band DLC file size from XBox Live: 150MB (500MB if it’s a full album)

Average Netflix Streaming (High Quality) video: 2GB

So by looking at these numbers, just downloading the OCCASIONAL Rock Band downloadable content and watching a movie every OTHER Saturday Night would cause you to incur bandwidth overages if you’re using the standard $29.99/mo plan from Road Runner.

Is this a mistake? You’re damned right it is! Time Warner has obviously missed the boat that the internet is the future and by limiting people’s access to it, it’ll only drive customers away to other services that make online content more readily available (and cheaper!). So let’s discuss alternatives!

Alternative #1: DSL (“I just want regular Internet Access”)

"The Man"

Personally, I’m not a super huge fan of DSL because speeds vary depending on your distance from the telco and their bandwidth compared to the offerings from cable companies can’t complete. BUT, desperate times call for desperate measures!

AT&T offers a high speed DSL plan for $35/mo that has speeds of 6mbps downstream & 1mbps upstream. Comparable to Road Runner in price, AT&T offers a DSL plan for $25/mo that features 1.5mbps downstream & 384kbps upstream.

I agree that these numbers SEEM weak, but let’s crunch the numbers really quickly. What I want to do is compare maximum monthly cost assuming you leave your internet connection ONLY downloading 24 hours a day for 30 days (one billing cycle).

As you can see, if you’re only concerned with monthly transfer it would seem that AT&T DSL is the best alternative to your bandwidth requirements. If you need speeds higher than 6mbps, then it would appear you’re tired to Time Warner’s draconian bandwidth caps.

Alternative #2: Dedicated DS-3 (“I want speed, no matter the cost!”)

My doctor said I need more..

This sounds ridiculous, but hear me out. I’m sure nobody out there will debate that a dedicated DS-3 is a viable alternative to residential internet providers, but the numbers add up versus Time Warner Road runner because it’d be much cheaper per gigabyte and over twice the speed!

There are many DS-3 providers across the country and each one has different pricing structures. I took the average of a cross section of quotes it would cost me to have a DS-3 installed at my home in a coastal California city. I’ll break down the price using the same table above:

So as you can see from the above table, as ridiculous as a dedicated DS-3 line sounds as being used for residential internet access, it comes out being cheaper than Time Warner Road Runner! Food for thought for those people who have nothing but money to spare and demand top speed access and unlimited monthly transfers to their favorite… recipe sites.

Alternative #3: Dialup (“I want more monthly transfer, I don’t even care about the speed!”)

+++ATAH0

Wait, wait. Don’t close your browser yet. Just hear me out on this one

Dial up is something a lot of us remember fondly as our first gateway to the net. Internet providers did limit our usage, but it was time limited (for example: 30 hours per month). Not because bandwidth was more expensive then (which it was), but because telco fees were so high when it came to installing additional POTS line to the ISP. This way they could operate on fewer POTS lines without having to charge users higher monthly rates.

Dialup modem technology has plateaued at 56kbps over your standard phone line (depending on distance to the telco, same as DSL). The average dial up plan these days is roughly $9.99 and can be found in almost any market. It’s a fantastic alternative because it can work virtually anywhere without much additional hardware, effort on the end user…. or trenching fiber down the street

How does this even make sense as an alternative? Total monthly transfer! That’s right folks! Did you ever stop and wonder “Wait, 40GB per month? How much is that in kilobits per second?” The sad and shocking answer to that is about 16.5kbps. You heard me! The best Road Runner plan you can buy offers you less monthly downloaded data than a 28.8 modem!

So now that I’ve got your attention, hows about that great service comparison table again!

Have I sold you on dial up? Probably not But I’m trying to make the point that Time Warner has gone completely off the deep end with their pricing structure compared to the services that you receive. Am I the only person who’s floored that dial up is not only cheaper than Cable Internet but now also offers better monthly transfer at a lower rate?

Is Road Runner bandwidth REALLY $100 more expensive than dial up? No, if anything, bandwidth has become many times cheaper than it was ten years ago. So what gives?

Well, my personal opinion is that the bottom line here is the cable industry is in trouble from competition who have more focused and more easily maintained infrastructure. Competition in the Television market from companies like DirecTV and DishNetwork have forced some cable companies into bankruptcy because upgrading and maintaining a physical network has overhead much higher than that of a single satellite floating through space.

In addition, you have internet competition from companies like AT&T and Verizon who are starting to offer Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) in newer housing communities, which bundles internet, television and phone all under one low cost bill.

I hope everyone takes these points to heart and contacts Time Warner and asks them “What gives?” And if it comes down to it, look into one of the alternatives I proposed above because that’s our rights as consumers!

Cheers!

PS: If you get the DS-3, invite me over to your house. I have some stuff I need to download

Well, the other night my wife was watching a movie through Netflix on the TiVo and about four times it just quit out to the main TiVo menu. What the frick?

I told my wife to give the XBox 360 a try and see how it handles. Well turns out that the 360 had a hiccup too, but you know what it was? A buffer underrun! That’s right! My internet connection for whatever reason couldn’t keep up with the Netflix stream and it ran out of data. Of course the XBox client was smart enough to realize this, displayed a message and buffered some before streaming again.

My TiVo client? Crashed out. Talk about two code bases not up to par with one another.

So if you’re having the same issues, odds are your network connection (for whatever reason) is not keeping up with the Netflix stream and it’s just crashing out to the main menu of TiVo.

My suggested work around for the time being is try watching it on your XBox 360 if you have the option. Otherwise, you might want to contact your cable provider or stop torrenting all that norwegian snow porn

Cheers!

I felt bad that I kept mooching off my friends bandwidth and had to keep asking them for help in setting up my services and whatnot. This way is going to be much better!

Also, I thought I’d pimp out the name of my web host because so far I’ve been super pleased with the service. The company is InMotion Hosting and what totally sold me on them was that they offered a hosting package with freakin unlimited bandwidth and storage for only $8.95/mo! This was dirt, dirt cheap compared to other hosts. Check them out if you’re looking for some sweet affordable web hosting.

I also Google-Fu’d for a bit and found a grip of positive reviews! So here’s hoping!

Cheers!

There is no simpler a solution than a DVD player that outputs the 480i signal decoded from the DVD to an HDMI output. There’s no processing, no deinterlacing, no scaling. Just decode it and output it. Bam! Done!

My current home theater is based around a Denon AVR-2308CI Receiver which handles all my video processing thanks to it’s magical voodoo (and a DCDi video processor ). When searching for a DVD player to solve my previously mentioned DVD watching dilemma, I wanted just a simple DVD player that can output 480i over HDMI. Why should I waste my money on an upconverting DVD player when my receiver can do the same function (and probably better). Seemed simple, right?

WRONG!

It seems the internet defacto DVD player that does 480i is the Oppo Digital DV-980H which weighs in at $169 MSRP! There are a couple other options as well, including the previous Oppo Digital DVD player model, DV-970HD which was specifically marketed as a ‘cheap’ player that supports 480i over HDMI. The problem you ask? It’s no longer offered directly from Oppo and it still sells for > $100 in the secondary used market.

An hour or so of Google-Fu later I landed on the Pioneer DV-400V-K DVD Player! Pioneers own website lists its MSRP as $99 and with some luck I found it refurbished through an Amazon reseller for $49! EURIKA! At last the lords of the Internet blessed me with a little devine intervention on my search results

I got to wondering after my pilgrimage to find this DVD player, why does it have to be so hard? I mean, if manufacturers like Denon offer Receivers with video upscaling and deinterlacing already included, why do they also sell DVD players with the SAME functionality? You’d think they’d try to offer a family of products that not only work well with one another but don’t waste your money on duplicate hardware that you won’t be utilizing. Denon is a prime example of this because even their ‘low end’ DVD player still carries an MSRP of $169 (and even then, it uses the built in DVD hardware deinterlacer without offering pure 480i output).

So as I said, there HAS to be a good quality family of products out there that are symbiotic and AFFORDABLE because they’re saving money on not having to waste it on unused hardware.

One of the selling points for me on the Samsung NV24HD was the fact that it was able to capture high definiton video in 720p (1280×720, MPEG-4 H.264). Combine this with the 16GB Transcend SDHC memory card I bought to use with it, and I now had a point and shoot camera AND an HD video camera that could record over five hours of HD content.

After a couple test trials using my cat among other things, I started to notice when playing back the files using Quicktime on my computer that the video seemed fairly choppy and also the audio would drop out and then come back from time to time.

My first suspect was the memory card thinking that it might not be fast enough to record the video. But the Transcend 16GB SDHC card I purchased was certified Class 6 SDHC (guaranteed minimum 6mbps), which is the fastest you can buy for SDHC cards, so that couldn’t be the issue.

I then tried perhaps using another computer to play back the file, so I fired up my wife’s Black MacBook and used Quicktime on her machine. I had the same issue of choppy playback (at the beginning of the file) as well as the audio dropping out at the same points.

I suspect one of three things:

1. This is an incompatibility with the MP4 files generated by the NV24HD and Quicktime, which I should probably e-Mail and ask Samsung about.
2. It’s an issue with the memory card I’m using not being able to keep up with the recording device and thus losing data while recording video.
3. It’s an issue with the NV24HD itself or an issue with the hardware encoder that’s used to compress the H.264 video stream.

I imagine it takes a bit of CPU power to compress video to 720p real time, and it’s evident on the NV24HD because after shooting continuous video for over five minutes the camera gets noticeably warmer.

ANYWAYS, if you have experienced this issue or have some ideas for a remedy I’m all ears

Cheers!