No intelligent company tosses $250 worth of components and PCB because a $25 chip is bad...
You do if you're in a rush to make a headline-breaking deadline, and if it's a significant number of rejects you hire someone to extract what they can off the board to put in the scrap bin.
Hypothetically if it cost them $2kUSD overhead per unit, and they sold 100,000 units expecting a 5% reject rate then they'd have 110,000 units of inventory (more in reality). Considering they're making 50% (roughly) per unit, a 1% loss per unit isn't a big deal.
I suspect that you've never actually owned an electronics business of your own...
Maybe someone has never raced in a formula-1 race, too...
-MarkM-
-MarkM-
Heh, in formula-1, of course, they throw out the engine after every race
Well, to start with, you don't scrap bad boards that cost 10x what the main chip on them costs - especially when you are paying software licenseing fees for each copy of the embedded firmware on them.
Once things have died down, and depending on what the trouble is with the board, you would either rework it to replace the hashing chip and sell it as an add-on module later, you might possibly use it in a lower end machine (probably not worthwhile), or, at the very least sell them "as is" for the cost of the parts. I do not doubt they ordered extra to get through this first batch, but I seriously I doubt they are planning to just throw money in the trash afterwards...
Once things have died down, and depending on what the trouble is with the board, you would either rework it to replace the hashing chip and sell it as an add-on module later, you might possibly use it in a lower end machine (probably not worthwhile), or, at the very least sell them "as is" for the cost of the parts. I do not doubt they ordered extra to get through this first batch, but I seriously I doubt they are planning to just throw money in the trash afterwards...
Why would they pay licensing fees for boards you scrapped? And what embedded software? The only thing the boards have on them are Asics and power supplies.
Also, each package actually has 4 completely independent hashing chips (complete with independent power connectors). It's unlikely all 4 will be bad and they'll probably just self-mine with the bad chips.