It is quite an achievement in marketing to squeeze 3-way deception into a single sentence. You must be a professional.
Finally, whatever one can say about Bitmain's chip that is ASIC-boost capable, at least it is somewhat honest in implementing switchable levels of ASIC-boost. One could actually measure the actual gains or loses from various levels of boosting and compare them with the table of theoretical values. It isn't as perfect an experiment as designing separate chips for each level of boosting, but a better scientific compromise.
All I can guess about Halong's chip is that it's design was worked out as some sort of political compromise or attack/defense strategy. I'm definitely not up to speed on the factions currently involved in the Bitcoin internecine warfare.
A professional marketing guy? No, Im not that kind of professional.
It always takes me a while to extract the useful information from your posts, but believe me, I finally agree with you, sometimes.
Yes, having the ability to switch ASICboost on/off (as Bitmain did), give you a chance to compare the two modes. It would even be possible to do a complete power shut-off of the unused backup logic in ASICboost mode, to avoid the leakage of these logic parts. But it still consumes silicon area, which increases your production costs in terms of $/GH.
Halong has chosen a very aggressive way to implement ASICboost without any backup logic for a non-ASICboost mode. In this way they have enabled the full potential of ASICboost in terms of J/GH and $/GH. I wouldnt dare something like that, without the support of parts of the community (e.g. Slush). The risk of falling down to only 25% of the maximum performance would be much to high, in case no pool would support rolling versions.
So yes, I agree, it was a sort of political compromise or attack/defense strategy.