Spondoolies Tech is looking ahead to the next generation of its Asic chips. The company has raised $5 million in new investment through a Series B round, and it’s developing two new chips. In total, it has now received $11 million in investment so far.
Having launched in 2013, the company began to ship it’s first products earlier this year and since then have established themselves as being one of the leaders in the industry as well as a favourite within the mining community. The companies’ thread on Bitcointalk which initially served as them announcing their initial products is a testimony to this with miners and representatives of the company conversing on mining related subjects, speculating and providing support. Combined with the high quality of their product, it is this level of engagement and rare transparency with their core customer base that has earned them their glowing reputation.
The company now has bigger ambitions than ever before. On the one hand, it wants to power 30 per cent of the entire bitcoin network with its own farms. And on the other, it’s passionately committed to keeping bitcoin mining viable for domestic users.
Future Home Mining
Guy Corem, founder of the company, explained his view on home mining in a recent interview with Cryptocoin news stating that the SP20 is the company’s most ambitious project to date. It’s designed for home users, and the cost has been driven down to try to keep this sector alive.
But Corem also acknowledges that domestic mining won’t be viable forever, since the returns are going to drop below break-even point. Unless you benefit from free electricity, this has to be a concern.
Increasingly, Corem feels that miners will move to the cloud and buy mining as a service. Spondoolies Tech plans to bake proof of the hash rate right into the machine at ASIC level. They plan to tie it to the customer’s contract, so they know the exact rate that their machine is hashing at. A move that will likely be welcomed by miners, especially in light of the recent comments that have come to light from customers of Gawminers.
Skipping 20nm
Continuing the seasonal announcements of new generation products that many hardware companies have made over the past few weeks, Corem announced plans for new Spondoolies technology. Speaking in an interview with Coindesk he explained that the company was currently working on their third and fourth generation products. One is a miner with hashing boards that can be replaced, meaning that customers will be able to upgrade their machines rather than having to continually replace outdated equipment. Due to the power constraints this will not be suitable for home mining, and will require hosting.
Another decision was to leapfrog the 20nm planar process since the company felt that advancements offered were not sufficient, a point that they have previously made on their blog and a philosophy that has echo’d by other tech companies. Rumours about NVIDIA skipping 20nm for their new generation of Maxwell GPU’s have been rife for months, though reportedly in some instances this has been less to do with the advancements that 16nm offer, rather than capacity, with Apple investing heavily in the process for their A8 processor.
Though the mining industry is already eagerly awaiting 16 & supposedly 14nm technology, Corem was keen to assert the advantages of Spondoolies Tech, explaining that their 3rd generation product which will still make use of 28nm technology would be comparable to the 16nm offerings of competitors, adding that the advantage of the 28nm node was half the price of 16 offering better yields due to its maturity. They expect the 3rd generation product to be released end of Q1/ beginning of Q2 2015.
Winning the Block Lottery
Just because home mining is becoming less profitable, doesn’t mean we’ll have to hand over all power to the big cloud farms once the difficulty level is too great. Innovative new hardware is bound to keep amateurs interested in being part of the blockchain.
In the Coindesk interview, Corem also announced that Spondoolies-Tech has contributed its RockerBox chip to a blockchain lottery machine, called the Technobit Dice. It has a 150 GH/s output and is aimed at home users who can’t afford mining equipment, and it connects to Windows or Linux computers via USB.
This isn’t designed to be a high power machine, instead it gives users the chance to find a block and at At $78 each, these little boxes won’t break the bank, although they won’t make a fortune unless you win. There is a price break if you order 10 units, but an SP20 may still be a better investment – at least for now!
What are your thoughts on the announcements? Let us know in the comments.