As one of the many people here who have paid for assembly (and test) but who got a refund on ASICs I cant help but think about revising the Klondike design to use the new ASICs.
Looking at the design, it looks like the changes would be minimal - The PCB would need to be changed because the pinout has several changes, the oscillator would need to changed, a few resistors would need to be changed to generate a DVDD of 0.9V (instead of 1.2V) and the PIC code that sets the clock control register would need to be changed, and the golden nounce offset would need to be changed. This does not seem like a lot of work.
I know a lot of people after having been bit by Avalon refuse to do business with them again, but it seems the A3256 ASICs are readily available - in stock in the states, not pre-order. At 0.024BTC per chip they are less than a third the price and 4 times the performance as compared to the first generation A3255. The power requirements are comparable as well.
It looks too me like the ROI on the incremental cost could be achieved in about month.
What do people think?
A question: Ive been away from this thread for a while, what is the current state of the Klondike design? I know I2C chaining and USB Bootloading are not yet supported, but is it working with all 16 ASICs? Where is the archive for the most recent, up-to-date version of the design?