Quote from: HyperMega on July 22, 2013, 12:22:26 PM

Quote from: Bitcoinorama on July 22, 2013, 11:32:17 AM

Also because as Johan and Sam have both said at the Openday Marcus and team are perfectionists which is why they had to be so hard on them with respect to timeframe. September is the priority. Marcus is not happy with his design, it will work, but not optimally as he would like. So after this first run is out the way, they get to let him of his leash...

Sorry, but my reality looks different. Engineers can't go to their CFOs and say:

"Gen 1 ASIC is working as specified. No major bugs, we can put them into the miners and sell them. But the design is not perfect, please let me do a Gen 2 ASIC."
"Ok, how much would it be?"
"Just another $2M."
"No way! Are you crazy, that are 10 Ferraris!". Wink

Just kidding. But would you invest so much for an gen 2 ASIC without any major technical reason? With respect to efficiency Gen 2 (assuming still in 28nm) will probably have something like 25% more performance while having less power consumption and silicon area (due to design optimization and less margins). Not much compared to the steps in difficulty. Is that another $2M NRE worth?

Developing Gen2 Miners based on Gen1 ASICs (extended product line) would of course make sense commercially and technically.

They can do a full custom ASIC ala Bitfury for Gen-2, for one thing. THat would be significant performance and efficiency gains. We'll see the end to pricing in gigahash as mining transitions to minimum-1th standards next year.