Dogie is bang on the money here, this announcement by Bitfury is simply an exercise in misdirection and PR bullshit. They have had several attempts to make a really high efficiency chip and obviously don't know the recipe. It's easy to say 'my chip can do xJ/GH/sec' without revealing key factors like how big it is (very important), what voltage it runs at and the clock speed at the rated efficiency. In all fairness to Bitmain with their BM1385 they have fullfiled most of these conditions, but no mention of the die size as yet.

To believe that Bitfury can go from an alleged 0.2 J/GH/sec in 28nm to 0.05 in 16nm is nonsense, unless they have very specific measurement points that bear no resemblance to actual operating conditions in practice. 16nm is not a magic bullet - at best you will get half of the power consumption of an existing 28nm design and maybe 2.5 - 3 x the transistor density, very much depending on your design and memory content. KNC tried this same trick with their solar chip, presumably to try to dissuade their competitors and this is more of the same.

The only company that has ever been totally transparent in what they claim to be able to achieve in terms of power efficiency AND tell you how they actually achieved it (eg domino logic) is Spondoolies, and that's largely due to the collective industrial experience of their people and their attention to detail. I'm pretty damn sure that if they were still selling to the public they could come out with all kinds of data about what they could achieve and how they could do it, but they have wisely stayed out of this game and left it to the bullshitters.

By the way, anyone every looked at the size of Bitfurys various 'boards' - they have an awful lot of people to pay......what on earth do they all do? Is this some kind of weird vanity project?