North America’s BTC ASIC Miner (ePIC Gen_1)
Jim Seto, April 18, 2023
How it started
Not too long ago, ePIC rolled out the SC200 Mining Rig for the Siacoin network. This milestone was the culmination of hard work and perseverance of a small, but talented team. Now, looking back, we are so proud of this achievement. It is easy for industry arm-chair quarterbacks to downplay the efforts it takes to design and to produce a mining rig. They would often say, “it’s just a few lines of code.” That may be so for an algorithm, but math alone is not enough to make a profitable mining rig.
From concept to reality, the path to producing a product requires many steps:
- designing, fabricating, and testing the mining ASIC
- integrating all the components on the PCB
- validating the performance and power of the hashboard
- modeling the air flow and heat dissipation through the chassis of the rig
- developing firmware to control the performance of the rig
- writing software APIs to communicate with the external world
- implementing factory tests for quality control
We encountered many challenges along the way, and we took them all in stride, making them into valuable learning opportunities.
What has happened in the last 12 months?
Customer Engagement
Not only did we learn how to bring a product to market from scratch, but along our journey we learned a tremendous amount about our mining customers — especially, their challenging and ever-changing requirements. To that end, we introduced ePIC’s Universal Mining Control (UMC) and companion firmware. These ePIC offerings are compatible with mining systems and enable enterprises to maximize the full potential of their mining fleet. The UMC and firmware will allow mining fleets to respond quickly to fluctuations in their requirements, most notably, the changes in power. Fleets will be able to ramp up and ramp down quickly accordingly. Enterprises can respond to power costs, coin prices, curtailments, and so on with the API to control performance and efficiency.
Supply Chain
As a company that produces physical products, we understand the critical importance of supply chain management. The past two years have emphasized this. We have already built strategic relationships with key suppliers, such as TSMC and ST Micro. As we grow our business, we have engaged multiple vendors, and even collaborated with them to make improvements. One such example is with PSUs — to make them more efficient while keeping the costs reasonable. By taking ownership of the supply chain, from materials to place of manufacture, we ensure that our products are robust with a low failure rate.
System Integration
We have a track record of bringing all these things together. But more than that, we understand how all the components work with each other through fine-tuned system integration. From the semiconductors to the software, from the PSUs to the heat dissipation, each of these components has a number of input variables that must be considered such as operating frequency, voltage, output performance, power efficiency, and so on. We can build systems that are tightly integrated, but have the agility to respond to the customer’s requirements, which are usually driven by market dynamics.
Intel Blockscale
With everything that we have learned and with all the skills and know-how we’ve developed, we are excited to be working on a Bitcoin miner using Intel’s Blockscale chip. Our talented team is well-equipped to design and to deliver this system. Intel’s advanced technology on Blockscale requires experienced engineering.
The Blockscale chip has a wide operating range. This allows for flexibility, but it also creates serious technical challenges. The chip has temperature and voltage sensing capabilities, which we can read, among other parameters. We can then program the chip to find the “sweet spot” for hashing. But, as one can imagine, the temperature and voltage will fluctuate, and many adjustments will need to be made to keep that chip operating in a stable state. All this is for just one chip.
Now, scale this effort to the multiple hundreds of chips in a single mining system. It would be simplistic to think that each chip would be operating identically on a hashboard, and treating them all the same would not maximize the full potential of the hashing power.
Now, scale this effort again, to the thousands of mining rigs that are in a fleet of miners. The engineering effort is enormous.
True to our Fundamentals
We’ve come a long way over the last few years. We’ve grown organically to manage sustainable growth. We’ve tackled new and exciting challenges. Through and through, ePIC’s guiding principle remains the same — bring together world-class engineering and focused operational excellence to deliver dependable, robust and reliable technology.
Final words
Stay tuned and imagine where ePIC can be at our next inflection point.
Will it be our Gen_2 BTC miner? Will secure real-time settlements on the blockchain be the next driver for high bandwidth and low power designs? Will better HW infrastructure accelerate the adoption of a decentralized internet (aka Web3)?
The constant will be the build-outs from ePIC into these emerging blockchain markets. We are ready and we think differently.
