Antminer D3 Blissz Modified Firmware for the X11 ASICs being produced by Bitmain is gaining a lot of traction lately, and with good reason. Read on to find out.
Most of the ASIC miners be it from Bitmain or any of the competitors, usually come with a default firmware that is considered stable.
Stable defaults are not optimized for performance and or consumption to performance ratio in mind, and it also provides very little room for user tweaking.
Advanced users, as usual, have their way tinkering with the software and hardware, and make significant optimizations to performance and stability while adding new features even when possible.
Blissz Modified Firmware for the X11 ASIC from Bitmain, promises up to 20% lower power usage and some extra features such as ASIC voltage settings per chain as well as the ability to overclock or underclock per chain as well as more control on fan operational speeds.
There are some usability improvements in the interface to make it easier and clear to use as well as some slight performance improvements as well to make it more stable and reliable regarding operation including cgminer binary optimizations.
As with any experimental custom firmware, one needs to be aware of the usual "might void your warranty" quote.
Also, note that it comes with built-in 1.5% developer fee built-in, so do have that in mind, although the improvements are well worth the dev fee according to users of the said modified firmware.
According to the thread in Bitcointalk, the restoration of the original firmware, in case you want to revert for whatever reason, is a straightforward process.
More details on Discussion of Blissz Firmware thread