I've been looking at the Bitcoin community for about two weeks now.  This started as my company has received numerous requests for an FPGA or ASIC solution for bitcoin mining.

   My company is a small design house that primarily designs ASICs, but also some FPGA and PCB level products.  We have even done a fair amount of small quantity production.  All of our engineers have 20 to 30 years of experience in design and development and we have collectively, successfully completed over 40 ASICs and many FPGAs and system level products.  Personally, I am a former VP of engineering for a supercomputer company and an accomplished processor architect.

   So just for kicks and chuckles I coded up my own SHA256 engine and built a bitcoin miner.  My first effort was to push the design through the Xilinx design tools and see where we stand.  I decided to only use the main fabric of the FPGA (no DSP or Block RAM) so that the design will easily translate into an ASIC later.  Here are my results:

   Xilinx Kintex 7   XC7K160-1   400 MH/s  at 10.12 Watts
   Xilinx Kintex 7   XC7K160-3   500 MH/s  at   9.81 Watts

   Those power numbers suggest that I could push the -3 version faster.

   Interesting but it seems that the community needs ASICs.  So we are doing a trial place and route of this verilog design in our ASIC tools to see where we are with an ASIC.