Hardware Spotlight: CVP-13 by Bittware

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FPGA Mining

5 min readSep 14, 2019

Hi Miners! It’s been a long time since our last hardware spotlight article. The hardware we are reviewing this time is an FPGA mining board that has been around for a long time in FPGA crypto mining community. It’s the CVP-13 by Bittware! Without further ado, let’s get started!

Introduction CVP-13

CVP-13 is an FPGA mining board produced by Bittware. CVP-13 is one of the most powerful FPGA board available. It's using VU13P chip which is a huge FPGA chip with 1,728,000 LUTs. However, with great power comes to a great price tag 😅, alas, the CVP-13 is priced at $5,495‌.

Datasheet Xilinx Ultrascale+ Virtex Chip

Mining and Profitability

Currently, CVP-13 can mine 17 different algorithms. Three developers are working on this board: Zetheron Technology🔥, All-mine⛏, and Dedmaroz🎅🏻.

The most exciting one is X16R by Zetheron. Zetheron has released the first version of X16R, but it's still unprofitable since it's still an uncompleted version.

Check out the complete list of algorithms here.

CVP-13 also comes with a handy tool called Bittworks II Toolkit. You can monitor your FPGA status and change the core voltage using the Bittworks II Toolkit. You'll get this tool for free if you purchase CVP-13. This tool is available for Linux and Windows (Lite version). You can get it by registering in developer.bittware.com and follow the registration process.

We also did some tests on the CVP-13 by ourselves. Here are some test results:

* based on online profit calculator per Sep 12th, 2019

Note: The testing result is not that similar to the claimed hashrate because of the setup. We didn’t fully optimize the CVP-13 (better cooling, voltage settings, and frequency settings). But, some people in the FPGA Discord Community has reported a similar hashrate with a better setup.

We also did some testing with Zetheron's X16R. It's still buggy, so we ran it for 9 hours but still got no shares. Hopefully, the working version comes soon!
Update 9/16 - We got the Zetheron's X16R working on our CVP-13!

You can see more details on our test results here.

Pros

🐘 Powerful VU13P Chip. VU13P is 46% bigger than VU9P. It’s able to fit more cores into the chip, which means it can produce more hashes than BCU1525, BTU9P, and other VU9P boards.
👨‍💻 Developers Working on CVP-13. A lot of renowned developers like Whitefire, Dedmaroz, and Allmine are working to make bitstreams for this board. There's an upcoming X16 algorithm for CVP-13 coming soon!
💧 Built-in Waterblock. CVP-13 is ready to be water-cooled.
🛠 Tools for Monitoring. You can use Bittworks II Toolkit Lite or Bittworks II Toolkit to configure voltage and monitor the CVP-13. This tool is convenient for monitoring and controlling the CVP-13.
🤝 Trusted Manufacturer. Bittware has been around for over than 25 years.

Cons

🔬 Unoptimized Bitstream. Most of the available bitstream for CVP-13 is unoptimized, so the device hasn’t reached its maximum potential yet.
💸 Long ROI Time. As mentioned before, most of the available bitstreams are not at the maximum hardware potential. Resulting in a long ROI time for this device.
↔️ USB Connection Issue. Some CVP-13 users experienced some issue with the USB connection. Error rates are higher than expected because the USB serial buffer of CVP-13 is smaller than VU9P boards. Future bitstream builds are supposed to fix this issue, or you can use a shorter and better quality USB cable.

Hardware Specification

CVP-13 Board Specification:

Virtex UltraScale+ VU13P
2Gbit Flash memory for storing FPGA bitstreams
2 DIMM sites
PCIe interface x16 Gen1, Gen2, Gen3
USB interface: BMC, FPGA UART, FPGA JTAG
4 QSFP28 cages
2 UltraPort SlimSAS
Board Management Controller
Liquid-cooled
The external 8-pin power connector

More details: CVP-13 Datasheet

Company Background

Bittware is headquartered in Concord, New Hampshire, United States. For over twenty-five years, the company has designed and deployed high-end board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to-revenue for their OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) customers. The company provides enterprise-class accelerator products by leveraging the latest industry-leading FPGA technology from Altera and Xilinx. They are based upon industry-standard COTS form factors including PCIe, VPX / OpenVPX, AMC, XMC, and FMC (VITA 57). Bittware provides modified solutions and licensed designs when it is not possible to use industry-standard boards. These programmable products dramatically increase application performance and energy efficiency while reducing total cost of ownership.

Bittware serves customers of many sectors ranges from commercial, broadcast and video, government, financial, mil/aero to instrumentation. Currently, The company is penetrating the cryptocurrency mining market through CVP-13 boards featuring Xilinx VU13P FPGA chip.