Quote from: darbsllim on June 11, 2011, 06:51:53 AM

does anyone have a rough estimate of cost right now? I though the cost to produce makes it a lot more expensive than GPU mining...

It depends on the technology used. There is a rather large one-time, non-recurring expense, and then some price/unit for the actual manufacturing. Of course the more you can pay upfront, the better technology and lower per unit cost you get later. I made some research yesterday (and I was just about to open such a topic

), but unfortunately the manufacturers are pretty secretive about their prices.

But it seems to me that the lower end starts somewhere around $100k one-time cost which gets you a structured asic. This will give higher performance than an average fpga, but far from a real asic, and also the unit cost won't be that low. (but much cheaper than an fpga) As far as I know, ArtForz is about to order such a design.

For a real ASIC however you will need to pay a lot more upfront. (a million bucks? couldn't find exact quotes anywhere), but you could absolutely own the network with dirt cheap ICs. The technology is the simplest possible: only digital gates, no analog stuff, you don't even need memory blocks, also no complicated IP is neccessary, everything can be done and tested on FPGAs. The thing could easily run at least 100-200 MHz, even with an older technology (you don't want to pay for a 45nm process), and probably a few full pipelines could fit in. That means several hundres of MHash/sec on each chip, possibly more. The chip can be in a very simple case, with low density pinouts, so it could be soldered very easily, even with DIY methods. But that would take a lot of time with for example a thousand chips Cheesy

If you had the money to manufacture the IC, making the PCB is pocket change. And bamm, you have a lot of panels, each of them with around a hundred chips, each chips putting out 100s of MH/sec. There is a topic somewhere discussing whether the CIA could commit 50% of the full network power. Well, they certainly could.

There is a free fpga design out there already, that's a good starting point. What it lacks is a mean to distribute the work and collect the result, as it currently has some hack relying on the debug features of the fpga and its dev panel. But it wouldn't take really much time to come up with a full design that can be quickly converted to any format the manufacturer needs.

Also, if you want to be safe, you probably want a design that can be somewhat reconfigured, so if the mining project fails, you still have an IC that can be used for other tasks requiring fast SHA-256 computation.