Virtual Mining Corporation (VMC) has closed a deal with fabless semiconductor firm eASIC to use its 28 nm ASIC chip in its mining boxes. The boxes will be expandable up to 24.5 TH/sec, VMC says.
The Springfield, Missouri ASIC miner manufacturer will use the Nextreme-3 design from eASIC in its Fast-Hash One mining boxes, which it says will ship in the last half of November. There will be three ASIC miners, allowing for different maximum hash rate capacities.
The Nextreme-3 chip provides a nominal hash rate of 16 GH/sec, or 20 GH/sec overclocked, and consumes under 12 W per chip, equating to an overclocked power consumption of 0.6 W per GH/sec. This outperforms KnCMiner’s proprietary 28 nm chip.
Kenneth Slaughter, CEO of VMC, says that buyers may customize their systems with up to 96 boards per system, each containing up to 16 chips for a maximum 256 GH/sec per board. This gives them a total of 24.576 TH/sec.
“eASIC have been developing their 28 nm process since 2010, and their experience is second to none,” says Slaughter. “As such, VMC’s chip development is much lower risk than that of other companies, particularly in terms of power consumption and reliable heat dissipation, which is often overlooked when comparing raw numbers.”
VMC says that it is a division of Active Mining Cooperative, which has sold shares at bitfunder.com to help it meet its chip production costs. Its site originally appeared in May, around the same time as its bitcointalk thread, and it originally announced its partnership with eASIC that month.
However, at the time, Slaughter had promised a miner based on eASIC’s 45 nm Nextreme-2 chip. Machines on those chips were due to ship by December 31, and the 28 nm units would ship by the end of June 2014.
Two months later in July, Slaughter announced that the company would go straight to the 28 nm chip. It promised 256 GH/sec for $4,000, using under 400 W, shipping in the October/November timeframe. It claimed to have reached its NRE (non-recurring expenditures) goal in mid-July (these are the expenses that a company incurs in designing a chip and then preparing the design for fabrication).
Today, the firm is offering a Platinum Edition bitcoin mining machine with a 256 GH/sec board for $5,699. This expands to 1.5 TH/sec, after which expansion cases will be needed to add more.
While VMC doesn’t have much of a track record in producing mining equipment, eASIC does have a history of producing ASIC chips, along with an impressive customer base.
It provides chips for Seagate and Fujitsu, among others. Microsoft, ARM and Mitsubishi are also publicly announced customers, say executives there.
Image credit: Virtual Mining Corp
Read our guides to find out how to setup a bitcoin miner and how bitcoin mining works.