Quote from: investorpgroovy on January 05, 2018, 03:47:53 AM

so I had assumed that all these guys were using standard IP libraries.. If what your saying is true, then its obvious why no one has picked up the IP from a defunct firm and ran with it.

Based on your comment I found a few details... seems like you have a good point

The BFL at 28nm was I guess 400GH/s at .27J/Gh or 1600GHS at .76J/GH ..but the layout size was massive compared to bitmain/bitfury, its seems like in addition to using standard libraries they had a significantly different design methodology

The bitfury at 28nm was at around .2 J/GH and supposedly the 16nm is .1J/GH..
The bitmain 1385 is listed at .18 J/G in 16nm at the slowest speed (21 ghs)

Interestingly Global Foundries (formerly the AMD fab) fabbed the BFL device

I think Jensen (CEO) of Nvidia already has plans to build specialized mining "GPUS" for ether.

So far the public intentions has been to offer mining gpus that don't have video outputs. The sole purpose is to prevent miners from dumping their gpu gear onto the market used when the inevitable crash comes and they can't mine profitably.

Global Foundries operates on a standard contract fab model so it's not really surprising that they built the BFL devices.

I don't think the transistor level design requirement is that big of a barrier. Bitfury did it by himself on a kitchen table over the course of a year. The problem is you won't find a design house willing to work that way. They have their tool sets and their work flows and they aren't going to diverge from it. So you will need to buy your own set of design tools and find a team of borderline Asperger's cases to do the transistor design.

Somebody should really fund a Professor to do the design work under an open hardware license. One the transistor design for SHA256 is done you just have to bring that into the fab's design tools and optimize for placement. Conductor losses are becoming dominant at these process nodes so that is where the biggest optimizations will be found.