Guys (and gals), I am really sorry things are delayed. I want these things to ship more than anyone else (seriously, I promise you, I want these to ship) and the delays are just as hurtful and awful to us as they are to you. We would love nothing more than to ship them all out yesterday.

The first batch should be about 20,000 chips or so. More than enough for all pre-orders and then some. With regards to bASIC, given the fact that Tom has shown basically nothing, no renders, no prototype, not even any power estimates, it seems exceedingly unlikely he will ship before us. I'm not saying it's impossible of course, but there are many "fishy" things about the bASIC offering. Of course, the whole power issue, which Tom refuses to acknowledge is one of the biggest clues that things are not right in the bASIC world. If he were as far along as he implies, he would at least have a fairly reasonable and accurate power estimate, but his little "slip" of less than 100w for 54 GH/s is pretty unrealistic at 90nm, especially if it's Cell ASIC or something similar. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible, maybe Tom has come up with major surprise and be able to ship on his currently stated timeline, but it seems unlikely at this point. Be that as it may, I absolutely promise we will be shipping our units as fast as we possibly can.

For the record, we do not use TSMC, which I suspect Tom uses. I really wish the Bitcoin Magazine article would come out so I can talk more openly about our technology /sigh. Even if Tom were to ship a few days before us (which seems exceedingly unlikely at the moment), the long term ROI on our units vs the bASIC is vastly superior, so you'd make up the difference in the long run. Is that ideal? No, of course not, but it does make a difference, no matter how much the bASIC people try to convince themselves that power efficiency doesn't matter. A year or two down the road when your Bitforce unit is still earning money, the bASIC owners will have a sad panda face when they look at their worthless hardware that costs more to power than it earns and thus has absolutely no use what so ever. Then, on top of that, you'll likely be able to send us your old unit for credit towards a new unit.

Just sayin'

Some aspects of the chip production ended up taking longer than expected to get rolling, which is why we have ended up paying for a bullet run and we're looking at ~25 days or so. We still intend to do the 1/3 shipping plan, I'm just saying we are getting that many chips in our first production batch... as in, we are getting enough to satisfy a lot of orders, but obviously we can't physically assemble 20,000 chips worth of orders in a few days. Not without hiring like 40 more people at any rate.