- SOC
- Xilinx Zynq-7010
- CORES
- Dual ARM Cortex-A9
- PROTOCOL
- Stratum V1 / V2
- NETWORK
- 100 Mbit ethernet
- POWER
- 12 W
- ROLE
- Work distribution, telemetry
Control board
Twelve watts of general purpose computer supervising three and a half kilowatts of specialised silicon.
What it does
The control board runs an actual operating system, usually a small Linux build, on an ARM core paired with programmable logic. It holds the stratum connection to the pool, receives block templates, assembles candidate headers, distributes nonce ranges to the hashboards, collects whatever comes back, and submits valid shares upstream.
It is also the only part of the machine you can talk to. The web interface, the API a farm's monitoring system polls, the temperature and fan telemetry, the pool configuration, the firmware itself: all of it lives here. A hashboard has no opinion about which pool it is mining to. The controller does.
Note the asymmetry. This board draws about twelve watts and costs a fraction of a single hashboard, and without it the other three and a half kilowatts of hardware is inert metal that cannot receive work.
Corrupted firmware or a dead ethernet PHY. The boards are fine and the machine is worth nothing until it is replaced.
