It's called trying to inflate the actual performance of your product and/or design knowledge. If your product is good, quote firm numbers based on hard, verifiable FACTS rather than allude to 'improvements' to a mathematical process which has data dependencies which cannot be changed or improved.
The academics who wrote the paper quoted are experts in their field - Dadda has an adder type named after him - and designed a method of reducing delay paths on an actual asic. They did'nt change or say they could change an algorithm. KNC claim to have an 'improved' algorithm, and that is just plain rubbish. Ask any mathematician.
Any respectable company would not make such ridiculous claims, if KNC have indeed used the methods from this paper in their design,then they should acknowledge it. Hence my annoyance.
Incidentally, Dadda and co. got their SHA256 engine to run at 'a clock speed of well over 1Ghz' on a 130nm process.
While typical SHA256 usage is for streaming encryption the fact that these scientists got a 1GHz clock rate is pretty impressive.
Whether this translates to a double SHA256 using nonce values - it may not. This double SHA256 depends heavily on transistor density, which brings in to play all sorts of complications such as RI, voltage sag.
Bitfury's 'sea of hashers' approach might allow some use of this though. Still, Bitfury is very competent, so he may have explored all options.