Quote from: gbx on November 29, 2012, 05:40:46 AM

I've resisted posting to all the speculative bullshit surrounding the ASICs. Simply because 99 percent of what's said here is speculative bullshit and I didn't feel like stinking the thread up with more of it.

I will say this.

1. I asked for a refund from BFL and received it promptly, in full in less than 24 hours.

2. I do think it's odd that "Presales" of this product require upfront cash. Most presales I've been involved with are not charged until the order ships. For instance, I preorder my favorite artist's limited edition music CD. Login, give them my CC. They do a preauth on the card, but do not charge until it ships. So taking the money well before a product is produced seemed odd to me, especially since they have VC funding? If anything, all that should be in a trust account with a 3rd party trustee. I'll stop there with speculative bullshit.

-gb

Well there is a whole subforum for speculation, admittedly this wasn't posted there but it's obviously not unwarranted. With the drama of block-halving come and gone (to really very little effect), there is little else to do but speculate on ASICs now anyway.

Quote from: crazyates on November 29, 2012, 04:18:12 AM

Quote from: bitCooper on November 29, 2012, 04:03:16 AM

Quote from: crazyates on November 29, 2012, 03:57:46 AM

...
As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.
...

So you believe that they can deliver *all* products within one month, when they are still tweaking the chip design in the wafer after their initial shipment date? I am no chip maker, but doesn't it take weeks or months to make changes to wafer designs?

I'm no expert either, but "The week of the 11th" was what Josh said. And yes, they have said that they have ordered enough chips to fulfill all current pre-orders.

Josh said that the week of the 11th (the 11th is a Tuesday(?), meaning it could be anywhere between the 11th and the 15th, and Josh has stated that it is likely to be towards the end of the week, here) is the "fuzzy date" when the first batch of re-vamped chips will arrive, not when they will be shipping. They have said they are still going to be doing the 1/3rd plan batch first, so assuming they are really committed to putting out a significant quantity of orders, that could/would take a week+ to generate (I believe there was some talk of building each rig and testing for 8-24 hours before declaring it "ready for shipping", this requires many man-hours).

Quote from: crazyates on November 29, 2012, 03:57:46 AM

As it stands right now, they are scheduled to deliver almost an entire month before their competitors. If you ordered an Avalon, then you knew this would happen. If you ordered a bASIC, then I'm sorry for your recent (yet severe) delays. And I'm not just talking about initial shipments, either; BFL has said they can still fulfill all current orders before the end of the new year (or at least close to it), which is well before the current bASIC shipment time.

Whether they will begin shipping before the end of the year I do not know, but they certainly will only be able to get a paltry amount of orders out before the end of the year. A poster asked on 11-20, if he ordered that day, when would his order ship, to which Josh replied "End of Jan or Beginning of Feb", this was of course, before the delay was announced.

These are all company statements, not my own speculation.

Now for fun, I will do some speculation:

20k Chips were enough for all pre-orders until 10-31 (and more). So for fun I will say that 150THash (the full chip amount) = pre-orders 7-1 to 10-31 (4 months), or 37.5 THash/month. Tack on 20 days for 11-20, that's 25 more Thash, for 175THash in orders by 11-20. Expected time of arrival of chips being ~25days from 10-31, is ~11-25. So...

11-25 -> 1-25 = ~2months to create and ship 175THash/sec of orders, giving us a production capacity of 87.5Thash/sec per month, or roughly 21Thash / week, so they can take weekends off and stuff (best case scenario).

With the new arrival date being considered, likely to be ~12-14, if they want to do a 1/3 shipping plan first batch of 21THash (seems reasonable, approx equiv to current hashing power), giving an extra few days for testing (the first week of production will need a slight additive for testing that will later be rolled into the consecutive weeks of prod), they can under the best circumstances be expected to have out the door about 21THash/sec by the 26th of december, juuuust beating the new year (but they have to work through Christmas Sad

).

Once things get rolling I expect 21/week sustained becomes easier to manage, so assuming demand picks up (once people see an actual product in hand, they will be less wary of buying), so how long to whip through the rest of those 100k chips?
Well 100k chips = 750THash, at 21Thash per week that is 35ish (rounded to 36) weeks, or about 8.3 months to whip through the whole batch.

Interesting that if Tom begins shipping Mid Jan (say ~1-14) and he produces half of what BFL does, and Avalon ships end of Jan (~1-31 say) and they produce half of what Tom does (based on first pre-order batch sizes), by end of August we will potentially see a network of > 1.25Peta hash Shocked

Or they could all be significantly delayed again. Time will tell.

EOF (end of fun).

EDIT: Looks like so far so good on my above estimates. Avalon recently said that they would try to finish their 300 preorder batch by end of feb, which means about 20 THash/month, roughly 1/4 the rate of 21THash/week. Damn I'm good!