The sale of the updated Pro version of the AntMiner E9 ETC/ETC miner is apparently going to start in a few days according to a tweet from Bitmain. The new Bitmain AntMiner E9 Pro ETC miner is supposed to deliver 3680 MH/s with 2200 Watts of power usage or 0.6J per MH/s efficiency with a price of $1299 USD per unit (without shipping and taxes) with the sales starting on February 3rd (up to 50 miners per order maximum). The new ETChash miner is not yet listed on the official website, but should soon appear with sales about to start right very soon, it certainly is a nice improvement in terms of hashrate and efficiency compared to the older non-pro E9 model offering 2400 MH/s at 1920 Watts of power usage (0.8 J/M). No word on the amount of available memory on the new E9 Pro units, but it is most likely 6GB like on the older E9 models, so that should cover ETC DAG sizes for quite some time.
With the AntMiner E9 Pro Bitmain is reaching the same level of efficiency as the latest generation of compact iPollo ETH/ETC miners, though iPollo is yet to update their larger miners with the latest hardware and to offer such low prices as Bitmain. Jasminer is still outperforming both iPollo and Bitmain in terms of power efficiency with their ETH/ETC miners, however they do come at a higher price and are yet to support dual-mining. Bitmain has not offered dual-mining for ETH/ETC and ZIL on their previous E9 devices and we are most likely not going to see ZIL dual-mining support on the new models as well, or at least no work yet about it. So, with the current low mining profitability of ETC and improvement in terms of hashrate and power efficiency is nice, but an addition of extra 30 or more percent mining profit from dual-mining with ZIL is something that everyone would love to have. For now, only iPollo does provide support for dual-mining with ZIL on their latest firmware, so it will be nice to also see them updating their larger miners with the latest hardware and with a more affordable price.
