If they have a functional and competitive chip why not go with pre-orders like every other mining devices selling company, if they get enough money/orders they could make the chips.
Has this been discussed already?
Actually I find it strange that everyone is ignoring the fact that FC didn't place a wafer order before his disappearance. He was supposed to have chips in hand in February so the order was supposed to be placed in December or early January. This never happened, yet nobody is complaining about this. If we ignore all the recent facts the problem is still there. They never intended to have miners with BE300 chip. Not on this financial situation.
Would the decision to produce the BE300 have been lucrative. Would it have been competitive? Would AM have been able to produce profitable miners? If not, there was no point in sinking the sizeable sums of money into the venture. We already know the fate of the BE200...
I'm actually pretty convinced that they could raise funds this way. AM has never failed to deliver a device once chips were confirmed as functional. Pretty sure they could sell $10 million in hardware preorders for equipment for delivery in June if they had management team and could prove functionality of the chip. Production runs for 28nm grow on trees.
You also believed that they will sell or deploy all the 60Ph/s worth of BE200 chips right?
AM clearly wanted to sell or deploy 60 PH and they tried. Chip sales did not go well so they produced the AMtube. The AMTube wasn't efficient enough so they produced the Prisma which consumed twice the number of BE200 chips and ultimately itself through immolation which led to wholesale replacement of the units with the Prisma 2.0 and or refunds. It didn't go as planned so they stopped while there was still sufficient funding to pursue the next generation; presumably the BE300.. (see above, lather, rinse, repeat)
You seem to believe that AM made baseless claims. They had goals that were quite simply not realized even though the effort was put forth.