KnCMiner has revealed a few interesting details about its upcoming Titan Scrypt miner, which is expected to ship this summer.
The company updated the Titan spec in March, revising performance figures and pledging to deliver upwards of 250MH/s – it originally promised 100MH/s.
KnC now says that the Titan ASICs will hit 300MH/s. Each miner will include four ASICs featuring a “record-breaking” 2,284 cores each. Each chip will be capable of running 18,727 threads, so each Titan will end up with 9,136 cores running 73,088 threads, the company claimed.
KnC says the chips feature 300MB of onboard memory. It is unclear whether this refers to on-die memory or not, as 300MB is a lot to put on a single die and it would take up a lot of silicon acreage. Bear in mind that this is not the equivalent of 300MB of memory on a PC motherboard or graphics card, as ASICs operate in a completely different way.
Some details remain sketchy
KnCMiner has already made it clear that the Titan ASICs feature a 55mm x 55mm package, but it has not revealed the actual die size or the transistor count. The package size does not tell us much about either metric. For comparison, the KnC Neptune ASIC features 1,440 cores in a 55mm x 55mm package.
KnC says the Titan miner will be able to extract over 300W of thermal energy from each chip. It comes in a relatively compact 60 x 50 x 20cm chassis and it can be powered by a standard ATX power supply.
Comparing the Titan to GPU miners does not make much sense, since the Titan is projected to end up much faster than a Radeon R9 290X (Hawaii XT) graphics card, the fastest single-GPU card used by miners today. Like the Titan ASIC, AMD’s Hawaii GPU can consume up to 300W, but it maxes out at about 1MH/s.
Tape out, shipping dates
KnCMiner says it is planning to announce the final tape-out of Titan ASICs “within the next few weeks”. The miner can be pre-ordered today at $9,995 and shipments are expected in the second or third quarter of the year.
Going from tape-out to full-scale production usually takes a couple of months, so at this rate we are looking at the end of Q2 or early Q3 at best.
However, this is anything but a smooth process. Even big chipmakers and chip designers are prone to delays and a host of technical issues. Designing and manufacturing immensely complex chips such as high-end GPUs or mining ASICs is a daunting task.
Delays are all too common in the world of ASIC miners and there is always a chance something could go wrong, although the news coming out of KnCMiner is encouraging.
In addition to the Titan, the company has also revealed plans to launch a hosted cloud mining service. KnC Cloud is expected to go live soon and the company says it will be releasing details of its “very competitive” mining plans promptly. The news is sure to interest Vault of Satoshi who announced a beta cloud mining service of its own this week.