If you recall the announcement, Josh specifically mentioned the
"final chip versions," so I'm going to stand well back because you are going off half-cocked, and that is dangerous to your fellow Musketeers.
(realizing some of our international friends might think this colloquialism is a porn reference, here is some background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-cock)
It would appear from the wording that there has been at least one other batch or test ASIC. FYI, I've not looked him up yet, but the guy they have doing the ASIC design is supposed to be pretty hot stuff.
His wording makes it sound like that, but someone asked whether they had any prototypes that were actually hashing at all and Josh said no:
Inaba, I guess you didn't see my question yesterday. Does BFL have a working (hashing) prototype ASIC miner?
No, we are waiting on our ASIC chips right now, as I've stated in a number of other places, though it's understandable if you have missed the posts, since they are spread out everywhere.
Admittedly that was a week ago, but he was using similarly confusing language back then too. For instance,
he said: "We are waiting on the bulk chips from the foundry, that is really the major delay right now" as though there were some previous non-bulk chips, which apparently don't actually exist.