Enterpoint Ltd (UK) has started shipping their Cairnsmore1 QUAD FPGA and BitcoinTalk forum user rampone provides video for his unboxing of his shipment.
While the production and delivery of the hardware is underway, the USB drivers, bitstreams (either Icarus’ or Enterpoint’s) and miner are just now nearing release.
“Our general target [is] to achieve performance levels of about 200 Mhash/s per array FPGA”, writes Enterpoint’s yohan in a forum post with the latest status. Thus the Cairnsmore1 QUAD FPGA is targeted to deliver around 800 Mhash/s.
These units can be arrayed into tower form, as pictured to the right, using stacking pillars (sold as an optional kit). Another view shows a tower of Cairnsmore1s stacked ten high. There are already mining operators ordering this many or more.
The Cairnsmore1 QUAD FPGA consists of 4 x Spartan™-6 XC6SLX150 FPGAs. Power supplies are to be sourced by the customer locally. Yohan won’t even guess at power consumption until testing at higher hashing rates can be performed.
At the current mining difficulty level of 1.58 million, the QUAD’s 800 Mhash/s will generate around 0.5 BTC per day (a little under $3 USD per day). Until power consumption numbers are available, a rough guess is that electricity might cost $0.30 USD per day using the typical U.S. residential electric rate.
To give an indication of how massive the current capacity of the Bitcoin mining network, if all mining was only done with these QUADs the number needed would be close to 15,000 units. To perform a “51% attack” a party would need to double the current capacity – something that would require nearly a $10 million investment in QUAD units.
This unit first was announced in April and pre-orders had been made for the entire initial production quantities (v1.1). New pre-orders submitted today are for September delivery and will be v1.1 models as well. The price per QUAD is $640 USD.
[Update: On June 23, 2012, Yohan from Enterpoint provided an updated message on his Cairnsmore1 forum thread.]