Agilemine's UltraMiner Is a Xilinx FPGA Board for Crypto Mining

Hardware startup Agilemine has developed the UltraMiner FPGA cryptocurrency mining board, which they claim has double the speed and four times the energy efficiency over GPU rigs, and cheaper and more flexible than ASIC platforms.

“UltraMiner FPGA helps you wring every drop of performance from the 16 nm KU3P Xilinx Kintex UltraScale+ FPGA at its heart. The KU3P is two generations newer than the chips in other affordable FPGA rigs, which makes it twice as fast while drawing half the power.”

Of course, being an FPGA, the UltraMiner can be utilized for other applications other than being a strict cryptocurrency board, and since the board is open source, the company plans to make available the RTL design file, schematics, and a support package (including Xilinx’s Vivado Design Suite) upon the board’s release. Since the UltraMiner sports a Xilinx XCKU3P FPGA with 26.2Mb of memory, it’s capable of pumping-out 355,950 system logic cells (SLCs) and 1368 DSP slices.

The board is also outfitted with a 12V 6-pin PCIe connector to convert mining rigs to rely on GPUs, and has a multipurpose USB interface for power, programming, monitoring (temp/voltage), and communication, and includes I2C and two UART. It even packs 16X HPIO pins (1.8V, higher speed, LVDS compatible), 17X HDIO pins (3.3V, lower speed), and a Xilinx JTAG port for programming.

The UltraMiner comes with a smart power feature as well, that lets users monitor, configure, and control the FPGA power supply remotely via USB. Thermals remain in check, as the FPGA is compatible with a 90 x 90mm LGA115x compatible CPU cooler solution or lesser 40 x 40mm heatsink if power demands are on the low side. Agilemine is expected to release the UltraMiner in the next few days or weeks on Crowd Supply — price and shipping dates are currently unknown.

UPDATE: The campaign is now live, starting at $399 for the UltraMiner and $419 for the FPGA board with CPU cooler.