I just read a bunch of threads about them. Not a hoax, but seriously overpriced still... This post pretty much sums it up...
AND They are not keen selling them. With prices ppl suggest here. If you have Machine laying golden eggs while none else have why would you sell it. Also this is totally GEN 1 hardware and totally in line what first SHA Bitcoin ASIC:s were performing. The Chip is not super performer but what it does it does it 1/40th of the Electricity of GPU rig
PPL are blinded by current GH and TH of BTC ASIC. If and when they get mass sampling of this chip what would stop them putting 160 chips in a Blade taking 70-100W and producing massive 9.6MH/s thats 12 GPU rig right there in 1 single ~70W blade.
Price? dont dream about it. They will mine and overprice the chip to cover R&D costs and get healty profit before dumping them into the market. If you are first you are First.
-Edit-
http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/1M3jtksp1upR33SX1VzeCfH5x9fc6zKykR.htmlBeen following above middlecoin address and they have add around 100MH/s daily there. Thursday - Friday - Monday - Tuesday - Today i just saw 957MH/s accepted. It is past 1GH/s accepted hashrate tomorrow evening. That would be closer 2000 AMD GPU units in mining rigs and rough numbers would be what 500-700 kw/h power and heat at minimum. I'm no professional but i would say it's not easy to obtain that much power. Compared these chips would do it with 7-15kw/h which is nothing.
specs are here
https://github.com/gridseed/gc3355-doc/blob/master/GC3355_DataSheet.pdf
And holy shit, it claims to do 59.6 KH/s while using 0.44 W
This is 0.00738 W/KH/s versus 0.300 W/KH/s for a GPU -- a 40.7 fold increase in efficiency. This is about the same increase in efficiency as compared to BTC when ASICMINER first introduced its chips; I'm curious to see how they did it. I've seen that on Middlecoin, but I'm failing to see how this is transformational. It would seem to me that the key in the near term (at least months) is equipment price/kh, not kh/kw. Granted, I have cheap power in the US, but at the rates alt coins are paying, the cost of power is almost exactly an entire order of magnitude less than the revenue that can be obtained by that power. Case in point: 0.01 BTC/day/(MH/s) is pretty easy to reliably obtain. For 1Mh/s, you're looking at about 300-350 W. 0.01 BTC = about $8.5 currently (and stands to rise). 350W = $1.68 even at a very liberal $0.20/KWhr.
My point with all of this is that hashing power is clearly the dominant metric for profit at this point. With that said, the prices listed in this thread for ASIC hardware are about two-fold WORSE than typical cost/hash represented through GPU mining.
What this is all leading me to is this - if power could (even liberally) be assumed to be soaking a quarter of your revenue from GPU mining, and these products are twice the cost of GPU mining, there is literally NO break-even. Even if they use no power at all, the best you could do with them is still to bring two thirds of the profit/investment of GPU mining.
It seems that these become a true alternative when they get to between the 1.0x and maybe 1.25x the price/hash power, and truly preferable when cheaper still. Similarly, it would take until profits/hash power are halved from their current levels to have the same effect. With all of the pump and dump coins and stupid speculators betting on them in the short term coming and going, I don't see that happening any time soon.
Am I wrong?