KnCMiner has bumped up the specification of its upcoming Titan scrypt miner. The Swedish mining rig manufacturer now claims its Titan model will deliver at least 250MH/s.
It’s an unexpected announcement, given the fact that the Titan was announced just a week ago and that the original spec promised a 100MH/s device.
KnCMiner told CoinDesk that the typical GPU used for scrypt mining today delivers less than 1% of the Titan. For example, an overclocked Radeon R9 290X usually delivers about 1MH/s.
The R9 290X is currently the fastest Radeon card on the market, although AMD is expected to announce a dual-GPU card in a matter of days. It should be noted that dual-GPU cards tend to offer a somewhat inferior price/performance compared to single-GPU cards, but since the dual-GPU R9 295 has not been announced, we can only speculate at this point.
Same price, more speed
The difference does not end there. The R9 290X is not nearly as frugal as scrypt ASICs. The card is based on AMD’s latest Hawaii GPU, which just happens to be the biggest GPU in the company’s history.
With 6.2bn transistors on a die measuring 438mm2, the chip is substantially bigger than the Tahiti GPU, used in HD 7900-series cards, which measures 365mm2 and packs 4.3bn transistors. Both parts are manufactured on TSMC’s 28nm node.
As a result, the peak power consumption of the R9 290X is close to 300W, even without overclocking. That’s just the card though, the overall system power draw is even higher, depending on the configuration. KnCMiner says the Titan will need an 800-1000W power supply, which is very encouraging, as it is roughly in the ballpark of a GPU mining rig with two R9 290X cards.
The company says it will not be increasing the price, which stands at $9,995.
Don’t forget about Alpha
Alpha Technology is working on scrypt miners of its own. In fact, it announced its first products months ahead of KnCMiner.
The company recently revised its spec, too. Alpha was originally planning to offer 25MH/s and 5MH/s miners, but earlier this month it said the rigs would deliver 90MH/s and 16MH/s respectively.
However, the latest announcement from KnCMiner has probably raised a few eyebrows at Alpha. The company priced its 90MH/s miner at about $9,000, while the 16MH/s unit should cost $2,200.
Alpha Technologies told us to expect 10W per 1MH/s, which was a great improvement over its original spec. However, that means Alpha’s 90MH/s miner will end up at 900W, although the company says it is trying to improve efficiency and bring it down to 750W.
Following its latest announcement, KnCMiner appears to have an upper hand both in terms of value and efficiency. KnCMiner says it already has $2m worth of pre-orders for the Titan and it hopes to build 2,500 units in its first batch. The volume of Alpha’s orders remains unclear.