Quote from: klee on August 16, 2013, 07:31:11 PM

Mind making a thread comparing KnC, HF, BF, Avalon, Labcoin, BTCGarden, Cointerra, xCrowd etc?
To have your comments somewhere concentrated, you seem very knowledgable..

Thanks for the compliment.

Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient technical information available to do a meaningful engineering comparison.

The only meaningfull contribution I can make is to shot down impostors who use the correct English grammar and technical vocabulary, but have no actual understanding of the underlying technology, e.g. kingcoin.

KnC had published some general technical information couple of days ago: https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-25 . I can't access it now, but it clearly showed that the package has over 1000 pins and that the single chip is comprised of 4 disconnected sub-regions, with absolutely every feature symmetrically quadrupled. Each of the quad in turn contains 24 identical copies of the hashing engine. When you can access it take a look at the floorplan and make a guess: what would be the probability of randomly distributed defects to hit every of the 4 copies of "control logic". What would be a minimum required size of a "single defect" that would kill all 4 regions? Even if you aren't rocket surgeon or brain scientist your honest guess will be better than the kingcoin's assesment of "insanity" of the KnC designers.

Here is a fragment of the Wikipedia definition of a code monkey: a derogatory term for an unskilled programmer who is only able to perform trivial or repetitive computer programming tasks or a reference to a job that treats even experienced computer programmers in a way that trivializes their problem solving abilities.

CAD-monkey is the hardware equivalent of the above term, because most of the hardware engineer's work involves not writing/editing "code", but operating some "CAD" or "EDA" tool/program.

Edit: CAD-monkey is derogatory if the person claims to be a qualified engineer. It may be a very friendly, or self-depreciating, reference to a skilled/trained salesperson of the CAD tools. Working in sales could really require skill and patience at repeatedly explaining/presenting "how to import a netlist" or "how to export to an ATPG (Automated Test-Pattern Generation) tool".