Alpha Technology upped the ante for their scrypt ASIC

Alpha Technology upped the ante for scrypt ASIC

Alpha Technology upped the ante for scrypt ASIC

Alpha-Technology-upped-the-ante-for-their-scrypt-ASIC

Not long after KnCMiner’s announcement of its scrypt ASIC machine named the Titan, their competitor Alpha Technology does not waste much time to up the ante.

 

Alpha Technology have some good news for both existing and new customers of their Viper scrypt ASIC machine. In a news update posted on the company’s website, Alpha Technology noted the competitors’ developments and assured that they would match the competition.

 

Existing batch one 5MHash/sec Viper customers can expect a free upgrade to 16MHash/sec, and the 25MHash/sec Viper would be upgraded to 90MHash/sec. The company will also reopen preorders for batch one on March 28th to replace cancelled orders if there is any.

 

Alpha Technology is still positive that they will ship the first batch by July, since they “started development in May 2013”.

 

Here is the full announcement of the company:

Greetings Miners!

A More Profitable Device

We are pleased and grateful to announce we were able to agree 90 Mh/s with our partners and still start shipping as soon as July giving us a clear lead. In addition to this we have not forgotten about our 5 Mh/s customers, we have every of intention making their device more profitable as well and they can now expect 16 Mh/s. Rest assured our prices will not change, the 90 Mh/s will remain at £5450 (~$9000) and the 16 Mh/s will remain at £1350 (~$2200).

This was made possible as we built our architecture in such a way that it would be feasible to upgrade our units in case we ever needed to. This does not mean it will not come at a cost to us as it will, however we are taking this hit and staying economical to ensure our customers get a competitive deal, not only in matching hash rates but the fact we were the first to start (we started May 2013) means we will inevitably ship first, not to mention the fact that we only take 30% deposit as opposed to 100% upfront when it isn’t necessary. We are still at such a stage of development where we can easily do this and not have it affect our schedule.

Our chips have been designed from the very beginning to be scalable in nature. Each chip has 128 threads which work in unison. At the same time each chip is also designed to be working in multi drop mode with the ARM controller as the master of each of the slave chips. Using this method the system can be designed with any number of chips on one board or multiple boards in a cascading manner. So depending on what performance is needed we can theoretically choose to incorporate as many chips as we want. The size will be unchanged and will be basically the same for both models as they share the same enclosure. On the other hand the weight will now be 4-5 kg for the 16 Mh/s and 6-7 kg for the 90 Mh/s. Just to note other advantages to competitors are that we will have Wi Fi support, be rack mountable and have an inbuilt CE approved power supply. We are very passionate about this industry and it is our intention of being in this for the long run, we are not after a quick cash grab and in doing this we hope to show that to our customers. Again as a reminder all our batch 1 customers will get priority to order first in batch 2.

Replacing cancellations

There has been a lot of demand for orders from both existing customers and potential new ones and as we have previously stated earlier in development, if there are any cancelled orders for batch 1 we will allow other potential buyers to replace them, as such pre-orders will be re-opened on the 28th of March for this purpose. As there are only a limited number of cancellations available orders will be closed as soon as they are filled up so it will be on a first come first serve basis. If you do become a customer this way rest assured you will still be a part of batch 1 and have priority in batch 2.

Replacing Order Process:

Orders will be opened in 2 phases, the first will be for existing customers starting right now and the second will be for new customers.

When pre orders are opened you will be given a new order number for the replaced units. If you are an existing customer, all your devices will be shipped together based on your earliest order number. From now existing customers can [email protected] to upgrade their order if they desire. On the 28th of March orders and will be open to everyone and will be closed as soon as they are filled so we cannot give a closing date.

For new customers, your new order will be part of batch 1 and shipping will be based on your position in the shipping queue, and just to reiterate you will also get priority for batch 2.
The State Of Development

Our development has been progressing steadily, not only are we on track but we are also beating our minimum targets in terms of power usage, we originally advertised 5Mh/s (now 16 Mh/s) at 100 watts and 25Mh/s (now 90 Mh/s) at 600 watts. We have managed to get power down to 10 watts per 1 Mh/s, this is a significant decrease and will be applicable to both our models, so of course the overall power usage will increase but the ratio to hash rate is actually better than advertised thanks for our optimizations. This would mean for example our 90 Mh/s device will be 900 watts however we will still aim for better power efficiency and may very well decrease it further, so it may hopefully be 750 watts.

As you may know from previous updates, almost all aspects of our development have successfully transitioned from design to production and with this we intend to start releasing images of the components, currently the LCD and PCB (printed circuit board) have been sent for fabrication so you can expect to see images of these within 3 weeks.

As far as the end of development goes, the end of March/start of April will see the chips being taped-out, this is when the chip design is sent for masking and fabrication at the foundry, at this point the chip is in its final state and there are no more adjustments to be made as such this will be the start of our large scale chip production. Once the chip is ready, we intend to demonstrate a working prototype of our device so look forward to that as we near the end of development.

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