Quote from: vm1990 on April 16, 2013, 07:20:10 PM

ok so the Avalon chips are made by TSMC which make chips but dont do custom orders they develop there own chips and you buy them off them...

proof they use TSMC chips
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Avalon#Chip_Specification

and proof they build there own chips not to custom orders http://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/future_rd.htm

Thanks VM1990 and ihtpf, you beat me to the punch. Just pitching in to say that these guys are right and fill in some detials.

By definition, ASIC's (remember this just means App Specific IC's) cannot be beat except by newer / better ASIC fab techniques which incrementally come over time. Reason: by designing operations at the die/transistor level, you don't have any unnecessary operations wasting die space, and you can finely tune the chip physically (rather than with software) so that the specific calculation you require is fully completed (ideally) in a single clock cycle rather than chunked across multiple beats which eats buffer space and leaves portions of the chip idle. Then you can line these up in parallel to start to really rock and roll quick style. There are various different kinds of ASIC platforms and a design team must pick one taking into account the many cost / performance tradeoffs while also going with a platform your engineers are familiar enough to work with.

Also worth noting: It's not new. It's an old chip design philosophy which was employed to varying degrees for many of the historically significant computer products from the 80's forward, and today silently drives many of the limited purpose mass produced electronics people use in day to day life. It also powers certain niche high performance applications where people will pay premium prices to cover low volume - which is the case i think with BTC mining at the moment... Normally, the development of an ASIC chip only happens when high volume purchasers exist to cover the design and fab costs, as they aren't usually affordable at low volume. Markets below a certain size are usually forced to use general purpose off the shelf chips like CPU's and GPU's which while quite flexible - will always consume more power and be slower than a custom ASIC replacement designed for the problem at hand.

So it's a sign of maturity that BTC mining is a big enough market to finance fully custom ASIC chips, Huzzah! AFAIK: ASIC's can only be beaten with better ASIC's.

Only downside for ASIC's: They are kind of useless outside of their design purpose unlike a general purpose chips which can surf porn. Now there's the dream ASIC chip - when will the Porn-ASIC be developed?? (lol)