Butterfly Labs, maker of several hardware and firmware systems, including chip level ASICs for bitcoin mining announced today that it is shipping its Monarch Bitcoin Miner.
Monarchs run at 700 GH/S with a power efficiency among the best in the industry at 0.70 W/GH. As a reward for our customers’ patience and loyalty, we are adjusting hashing power for existing orders in the queue to $1.97/GH (for 700 GH, effectively $1,379). Shortly before a customer’s order is ready to ship, they will receive details about their individual options.
Those who have closely followed the Monarch development will notice that the 700 GH comes in above the 600 GH performance specification we originally mentioned, but below the 1TH/s level we are aiming to achieve based on the strength of the underlying ASIC chip. While we have achieved much higher speeds on test boards, our engineers are still working toward a board solution that will deliver higher speeds within the power consumption, and the temperature range required.
Below is an image of the Monarch unit that we have been shipping, which includes a free sled to make it easier for customers to deploy multiple cards outside of a computer. (Please note the form factor change with water cooling instead of air cooling)
