Now, you'll notice that the jump from the P4 to today is way less then the jump between the first Pentium chip and the 286. That's because thermal issues are a big deal now compared to when the first Pentium came out.
That's kind of my point, a jump from prescott class technology that the gigahash level tech is on, to current process size shouldn't be worth a 100X performance increase.
There's also the die size issue. HashFast may simply be making really large chips. That's what KnC plans to do, and they're planning on at least 100Ghash per chip, compared to 0.3 for the Avalon.
I'm not thinking huge chips improve their chances in any way at all with dealing with power and heat issues.
KNC's "device" is odd, filtering what they have said has lead me to believe they are putting 4 dies in one package.