Reason being is that Bitmain likes to hike prices. Aren't you worried if you try and order 1000's of chips they might hike the prices because they will lose money to their competition?
Of course, but the hope is that bitmain and us would both profit if they give us a good price- although chip prices will probably dominate the price of our design so we could be in trouble if they do hike prices. Conceptually, even, our miner would be fairly novel so I can see that bitmain would be interested to see how it fares. Absolute worst case, our design is pretty flexible so we could probably change chips. I hate to say avalon but without the BE300 we would be pretty low on choices. Bitfury might hopefully also be an option by then.
To those of you interested in running off of existing S1 controllers, that isn't terribly high on my priority list but I would be glad to provide documentation to anyone else who is trying to do it if you guys beat me to it. Our goal is to make our miner versatile and useful to the community, not keep proprietary secrets. Odds are we will be using the iccarus driver off of cgminer (sames as antminer U1,U2,U3) with different flags for our voltage and clock adjust. I haven't compiled cgminer for the S1 controller but you shouldn't need much besides that (new, as of yet unwritten) driver on an S1-compatible cgminer to run our board. If someone knows more about running/compiling cgminer on the S1 controller please chime in.
Also thanks to everyone who donated sandwiches or wished us luck, it's really great to see people excited about this.
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novak