5
Nov
2022
We’ve been playing around with a Jasminer X4 1U Ethash and ETChash ASIC miner for a couple of days now and we have some more things to share with you if you are interested in the device. We’ve already covered some interesting findings and possible tweaks for the Jasminer X4 1U ASIC miner here, but we continued further trying to optimize the miner and see if we can squeeze a bit of extra performance from it. Our next obvious step was to disassemble the hashing board with the ASIC chips…

Removing the aluminium cooling heatsink, a single piece for the whole board, revealed the eight Jasminer X4 ASIC chips on the hashing board along with a controller chip and two memory modules. And a ton of thermal grease that needs to be cleaned and replaced before assembling the whole thing back again. Only the controller chip is not covered with thermal grease, instead it uses a thicker thermal pad for contact with the heatsink. All of the chips did have a good contact with the heatsink, so supposedly no expected issues with thermal transfer and cooling here. So, our hopes of getting a bit of thermal improvement by replacing the thermal compound with a better one would probably end in vain, but since we still have to replace the thermal interfacing material we’ll do it.

Cleaning up the whole thing properly does require some time and effort as due to the size of the crystals on the Jasminer X4 ASIC chips it is like cleaning 8 CPUs of computers. And you need to make sure you are careful not damaging anything, though the cleaned-up board and chips do like quite good. We are reusing the original thermal pad for the controller chip as we do not believe it is necessary to replace that one with a more efficient one anyway.

The main controller chip on the hashing board is a Trion T120 FPGA along with two DDR3 memory modules right next to it (no, that is not how 5GB of memory looks like!). This is the controller chip for the Jasminer X4 ASIC chips that is being used on the hashing boards, the miner does have a second FPGA controller chip with separate RAM chips on the main control board that hosts the software and web interface of the miner, there however we find a Xilinx Zinq chip.

Here is a single of the eight Jasminer X4 ASIC chips in a 45×45 mm package (678 square millimetres die size) with 1TB memory bandwidth, 5GB of memory and a hashrate per chip of 65 MH/s with each of the chips having 384 computing cores and 384 on-chip dies according…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Crypto Mining Blog…