I suspect it might be an actual ASIC, due to the price - but as it doesn't even match my PREDICTED performance or that one video posted (that was supposed to be for a "F3 model" anyway) it's certainly not a GPU killer.

A well tuned 6 card GTX 1070 rig will pull 186+ Mhash at about 700 watts (my 5 card rigs only manage 156 at 700 but that's with a HIGH power usage CPU mining Monero at the same time).

The PRICE however does make it attractive, if enough of the ethash coins don't fork soon and you have low enough power cost and the coin pricing doesn't keep dropping (we DID have a small rebound the last couple days).


It would take over a MILLION of these units being sold to manage 50% of ETH total network hashrate (then a couple hundred thousand MORE for the other ethash spinoff coins like ETC) - this is barely even going to DENT GPU mining profitabilty at the typical number of units Bitmain sells in a batch.


The question at this point becomes "is there something better in the Bitmain labs that they haven't released yet, how much better IF so, and when and what price will THAT get released at".