I reached out to Bitfury recently. They quoted 8.15 U.S. a chip and minimum buy of 2 million dollars. not realistic for the hobby engineer.....
An interesting question: Over what time frame would BitFury supply your roughly 245,000 chips if you were to cut them a check for $2M USD? I can understand why you wouldn't have pursued it, but I would think that 245K chips would be a pretty good sized run at a Fab facility, no? I also wonder what level of testing/screening has been done for those parts? I am hardly an ASIC guy, but I have seen the results of poorly screened processors, before the processor vendor has figured out what has to be screened for. Does the recipient of the parts have to speed sort (aka "bin") them?Maybe NotFuzzy would care to speculate on this (keeping his flame on "low")?
As for spec testing for performance binning, safe bet BitFury will only guarantee a minimum range of speed/Vcore that 'work's' along with quote-unquote Average performance expected from any given lot of chips. Given that even the Avalon chips constantly tweak their speeds when running I doubt any single narrow range of specs can be given. The 14/16nm node seems still just too unpredictable, at least for hot-running miner chips.