The reason Cointerra are dropping their price like a stone is they have yet to raise enough capital to fund NRE and they are expected to tape out imminently. You have to pay for your NRE upfront to receive your tape out results.
Nonsense. Their first preorder batch netted them some $14M:
http://thegenesisblock.com/cointerra-and-hashfast-sell-17m-of-bitcoin-miners-open-second-batch-sales/
28nm mask sets dont grow on trees, but thats enough to fund at least half a dozen 28nm bitcoin miner designs and masksets.
Yeah, do you honestly believe that?!
I see no reason not to. Its not in asic vendors interest to exaggerate presales. Quite on the contrary, its in their interest to lowball them as not to jeopardize the value of their next production batch.
But even if they are exaggerating, its unthinkable they didnt raise enough money to pay for their first batch by now, even from preorders alone, and its a safe bet a team like that would have had no problem raising the required capital beforehand. Cointerra doesnt need your money, they, like all other vendors, do need to lock in sales before people wake up and see where difficulty is headed. But no Asic vendor is cash strapped right now (unless one that would only accept escrowed preorders), the only ones cash strapped are the nail biting miners that sent them bazillions.
BTW, as for their customers, this one claims to be buying 50% of the first batch:
Quote
CryptX has a contract with Cointerra to purchase 1,000,000 GH/s of that companys 28nm chips. The chips will come from the first production batch, which will be tested on site and shipped directly to our PCB/board manufacturer in Europe. This arrangement lets us keep the time between chip production and boards deployment to an absolute minimum.
http://www.cryptx.com/peta-mine/