29 Dec 2015

Avalon 6 - Bitcoin miner with great efficiency

We would like to share our experiences with the Avalon 6 miner. Avalon 6 is the newest miner from Canaan-Creative, the authors of the very first BTC miner based on FPGA and Avalon A3256, the very first BTC mining ASIC. Avalon 6 consists of 80 A3218 18nm chips, which can be controlled by Raspberry Pi or any other computer by using the USB interface. Its maximum hash rate can reach 3.7 Th/s while it can also be under-clocked to achieve even better efficiency. By connecting the miners to USB HUB, you can simultaneously manage up to sixty Avalon 6 miners to reach approximately 220 Th/s. Since this miner connects to any computer, including Raspberry Pi via USB cable, it gives us some more configuration and tuning options. You can find how to compile cgminer with Avalon 6 support from our GitHub cgminer source repository in the examples below. This includes the latest cgminer version as well as extranonce.subscribe option:

How to compile cgminer with Avalon 6 support under Linux (Ubuntu example)?

apt-get install git autoconf automake libtool pkg-config libcurl4-gnutls-dev libjansson-dev uthash-dev libncurses5-dev
git clone https://github.com/nicehash/cgminer-ckolivas.git
cd cgminer-ckolivas
./autogen.sh --enable-avalon4
make
./cgminer -V

cgminer.conf config file example

{
"pools" : [
        {
                "url" : "stratum+tcp://sha256.eu.nicehash.com:3334",
                "user" : "17FP4wt5a4vXUi7ugZko4tYvHP8kt41cog.Avalon6",
                "pass" : "d=4096"
        },
        {
                "url" : "stratum+tcp://sha256.usa.nicehash.com:3334",
                "user" : "17FP4wt5a4vXUi7ugZko4tYvHP8kt41cog.Avalon6",
                "pass" : "d=4096"
        }
],
"avalon4-freq" : "400"
}

cgminer startup command

./cgminer --config cgminer.conf

Avalon 6 extranonce.subscribe feature has also been included in the latest xnsub release of the firmware, which was prepared by Canaan Creative Avalon developers and can be downloaded here:

Please note that avalon4* settings are actually correct - the settings were obviously re-used from the previous generations of miners and were not renamed to avalon6*. By adjusting the "avalon4-freq" (try ranges from 100 - 500) parameters you can achieve various speeds with different efficiency levels. This gives you great control over your miner and some nice playground for Bitcoin mining fans. Overall we are very satisfied with the build quality, performance and efficiency of Avalon 6 and would recommend it to our users. It can be fast, but it can also be reasonable quite and also very power efficient - of course it depends on the startup configuration parameters. Please note that this miner requires a minimum of 1050 W power supply unit with 4 x 6 pin high quality PCIe power connectors.

More information on Avalon products can be found on their official store or at the Avalon Bitcoin wiki website.