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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday August 24 2017, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the miner-49er dept.

ASUS will sell a motherboard that can support 19 GPUs. The product is intended for cryptocurrency mining:

ASUS this week teased the new "B250 Mining Expert" which boasts all those slots because – as the name implies – its role in life is mining cryptocurrency.

The board can't do it all itself, of course. ASUS' preferred GPU is the P106, a variant of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060), 1,280-CUDA-core, 1,506MHz affair that can surge to 1,708 MHz when required and boasts 6GB of RAM. ASUS' version is shorn of anything to do with displaying video so that it can smoke hashes to cook cryptocurrency.

Do the math: 19 GPUS, 1,280 cores apiece ... this motherboard could end up hosting 24,320 cores before you fill the Intel LGA 1511 socket with a Skylake, Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake CPU. That chip's half-dozen or so cores are hardly worth counting!

The board is also equipped to slurp three power supplies, because all those GPUs are thirsty. There's also a capacitor dedicated to each PCIe slot to make sure the juice doesn't fluctuate and upset the precious mining machines. A mining-specific BIOS that lets you manage all those GPUs rounds things out.

What do you do with this after cryptocurrency mining is dead?


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  • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:56AM (5 children)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:56AM (#559327)

    Thanks for all the details. To reply to your various points:

    I'd expect an electric kettle to boil water quicker, as they tend to have a higher power rating (1200-3000W), and that energy goes to an element sat in the water. I'll agree that if you already use a microwave to do the job, the perceived benefits from buying a kettle to do it instead may be limited. (If cooking pasta and in a hurry, I'll boil the water in a kettle as I turn on the hob, and pour the boiled water into the pan.)

    Microwave ovens are now standard equipment in UK kitchens, since at least the 1990s. They're also standard fare in an office kitchen, alongside a kettle or (at larger establishments) a wall-mounted electric boiler, but the microwave is usually for reheating food or drinks.

    On kettles being a fire hazard, many workplaces have lost their bread toasters in the last decade due to risk-averse policies, but there'd be uproar if somebody sugested taking the kettle away. A small kettle is an expected piece of equipment in a hotel room, in order for guests to make their own hot drinks.

    With regard to your last paragraph, electric kettles have been fitted with a thermal cut-off since the 1950s, so they can't be kept on a rolling boil. This can be done with a (gas) hob kettle, but these are rather niche items these days. These typically have a steam whistle that fits over the spout to let you know when the water has boiled (and remind you to take it off the heat so it doesn't boil dry).

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:28PM (4 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:28PM (#559445)

    I'd expect an electric kettle to boil water quicker, as they tend to have a higher power rating (1200-3000W)

    Who actually boils a single cup of water with a kettle? Sure, if you're trying to boil a large quantity of water (enough for 6 cups of tea perhaps), I can see your argument here, but I only drink one cup of tea at a time, not enough for a whole family. It seems to me the whole kettle thing only makes sense if you have a small group of people you're making hot drinks for all at once.

    Also, there's problem with that power rating: it's flatly impossible here in the US. Our wall outlets are limited to 15A at 120V, or 1800W max (really more like 1500W realistically, as no one makes a device that actually consumes 15A as that'd be too close to blowing the breaker, so they stick to around 12A). So you're not going to find an electric kettle that has significantly more power than a microwave (which these days are 1000-1200W; the decent-size ones are 1200, the small ones are 1000).

    A small kettle is an expected piece of equipment in a hotel room, in order for guests to make their own hot drinks.

    Hotel rooms here all have microwaves for this purpose, and because they're also useful for reheating food, making oatmeal, and lots more. In short, microwaves are far more versatile.

    • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:20PM (3 children)

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:20PM (#559538)

      Who actually boils a single cup of water with a kettle?

      One of the low-hanging fruit of energy-saving initiatives in decades past was to encourage people here not to boil a full kettle of water, only what they needed. You just need to make sure you reach the minimum-fill level to cover the element (typically 500ml on a 1.8l kettle). I just timed my kettle boiling roughly 500ml of water from room temperature, reacheda rolling boil at around 55 seconds, and the thermal cut-out tripped after 64 seconds. (I hope this is useful for you to compare with.)

      Our wall outlets are limited to 15A at 120V, or 1800W max ... So you're not going to find an electric kettle that has significantly more power than a microwave (which these days are 1000-1200W

      Aha, UK household appliances are fused at 13A (on a ring circuit), but that's at 240V AC, so we can hit 3kW with no risk of blowing anything. In contrast, a typical power output for microwaves in the UK is 700-800W. Given that, I can well understand why we use kettles to boil water, whereas you opt for microwaves.

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday August 28 2017, @02:54PM (2 children)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday August 28 2017, @02:54PM (#560262)

        Holy crap, 700-800W? Why on Earth do you use such tiny microwaves these days? Around here, you can get a really nice medium-size (which is really as large as you really need) microwave that's 1200W for maybe $120. The 800W things are in the $50-75 range; those are the crappy tiny ones you'd get for dorm rooms or offices and not expect to last too long. And it's not like the UK makes its own microwaves; they're all made in China by the same handful of companies.

        The other thing about using microwaves to heat water is that it doesn't have to be water: if I want to make a latte or hot chocolate, I can easily pour a mug of milk and heat that in the microwave. When I'm done drinking it, the mug goes in the dishwasher. I assume you don't clean your kettle after every cup of water you heat (because it's just water), but if you tried that with milk you'd have to clean it every time which would be a pain.

        You guys need to start buying some nicer microwaves. You have plenty of electric power to run them after all (over here, it's pretty easy to blow a breaker by running the microwave at the same time as the toaster, as they''ll frequently be on the same circuit in older houses; in new construction there's usually a dedicated circuit for the microwave but older houses weren't designed for microwaves).

        • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:32AM (1 child)

          by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:32AM (#560729)

          1200W is really rare in the UK, and you'd be paying dearly for it. Looking at microwaves sold by a common bricks-and-clicks electrical retailer, Currys, they have 25 microwaves at 700W, 84@800W, 85@900W, and 19 @ 1000W. A bare bones 700W model can be bought new for £40, and a typical price for a standard microwave would be between £70 and £150. Prices go well into the hundreds of pounds if you want a combination microwave oven, etc.

          I'll turn to a microwave to warm some milk for a mug of cocoa, but only because doing so in the kettle would be silly. (Pan on the cooker would be the backup choice.)

          Incidentally, another key difference between the UK and USA/Canada is that dishwashers are still not standard in every home: they're more common than they have been, but are still a bit of a luxury. (I've never had one, neither have my parents or parents-in-law, my sister-in-law does have one in her current house, but didn't in her previous one. Oddly, TV ads for dishwasher powder have been around since my childhood at least.) Similarly owning a tumble dryer isn't universal: many still use a washing line to dry clothes. This was a surprise to my Canadian mother when she moved here in the 80s. Some of the above might be explained by a wobbly economy in the 50s, 70s and 80s, but UK houses are a lot smaller than in North America, so there isn't as much space for such things. The combi washer/dryer has made significant inroads, especially in flats that don't neccesarily have a garden to put a washing line up in.

          • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 29 2017, @04:28PM

            by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday August 29 2017, @04:28PM (#560896)

            Given how rainy and foggy the London area of English is famous for, I really don't understand why electric dryers aren't more popular there. Line-drying doesn't work too well when it's raining or damp. Maybe my perception of that area is flawed, but can you imagine trying to rely on line-drying outside in the pacific northwest area of the US (Seattle, Portland)? Your clothes would never get dry because it's always drizzling. Line-drying also doesn't work well when it's cold outside, or worse, below freezing.