While we were talking to Yoshi goto over at the Bitmain booth during Inside Bitcoins Berlin last week, he also unveiled another major announcement. After announcing the company would be one of the exhibitors at Inside Bitcoins Berlin a while ago, we were actually the first ones to actually see and take pictures of what he was talking about.
Not too many details were made available when Bitmain unveiled the Antminer S2 upgrade kit, but we did manage to obtain some vital information. For starters, the Antminer S2 upgrade kit will feature the same chipset to be found on their current Antminer S5 boards, and the chip numbers are exactly the same as the S5 model.
No official pricing was revealed at the when we spoke to Yoshi Goto, but he was willing to tell us that the upgrade kit will be made available at some point in March of 2015. An exact date could not be provided at that point, as the boards we saw are only prototypes (which are working). Some further testing and fine tuning needs to be done before mass production of these kits will commence.
It is not the first time we see an upgrade kit for Antminer Bitcoin ASIC miners. Back when the Antminer S3 was released, Antminer S1 owners could get their hands on a S3 upgrade kit shortly afterwards. Those upgrade kits came with 2 hash boards, 2 mini customized heat sinks, 1 adapter board, 1 control board holder, 1 fan [including screws and cover] and all necessary tools and pins to install the upgrade kit.
As you would come to expect from that previous upgrade kit, the Antminer S2 upgrade kit will allow ASIC owners to mine at the same speed and power consumption as the current Antminer S5 machines. However, do keep in mind that you may want to swap your power supply as well in order to account for the change in energy usage.
The best thing about Bitmain is the fact this company always deploys its mining hardware first before selling it to their customers. Most traditional Bitcoin ASIC manufacturers would open up these kind of items for pre-order, and start accepting Bitcoin payments before the upgrade kit is even ready for mass production. This has caused many issues in the past, and Bitmain pride themselves on being one of the very few reliable Bitcoin mining manufacturers.
Will you be buying the Antminer S2 upgrade kit? Let us know in the comments below!