People seem to forget that this is essentially a group buy allowing the price reduction from ~$5k retail to ~$3.35k.
Now, sensless and GPUHoarder has gone the extra mile and *may* provide supporting platform for other developers to share their bitstreams. That does not mean you cannot use any other public bitstreams available (whitefire990) or program one yourself.
Again, it is essentially a group buy, at below retail price, I doubt these guys are making any significant profits on these, beyond the cost of all the time spent organizing it.
It's not a may, It's definitely happening.
senseless / GPUHoarder - On the topic of remote development hardware, will you be enabling the FPGA's bitstream protection features (encryption key) on shipped units? I remember reading something about encryption keys earlier in this thread.
Correct, yes, we'll be burning the efuse and using the key to encrypt our shell. The shell will be open to any developer who wishes to release a core to the community. They'll be able to generate a DCP file locally or on a node I can provide, then upload that dcp to us where we generate the bitstream. After manual validation that everything works we'll release the bitstream to the community and it will instantly become available to all miners without any software update (except in the case if it's a new algo that requires software update for nonce validation).
We will be releasing our lyra2z and gpuhoarder will be releasing his cnv1/monerov7.
Is the FPGA on your board socketed ?
No