Good work Vince, the mistake over $ and c is forgivable, they are not your native currency.

Now please read this:


NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang publicly questioned the economic viability of the whole 20 nm node, saying that its cost per transistor might never drop below that of 28 nm.

The 20 nm node is arguably the most difficult ever attempted for production, and just a description of the technical challenges would justify a small book.

Cost is paramount. NVIDIA’s Huang may well have been right: with its greatly increased costs, 20 nm may always be more expensive than 28 nm for the same number of transistors.

For SoCs with significant amounts of non-scaling circuitry, such as RF or other analog transistors, monolithic passive components, or electrostatic discharge protection structures, the gap will be larger than for dense logic-only SoCs. Quite simply, for an SoC to migrate to 20 nm, there will have to be some benefit—integration, performance, energy efficiency, or IP access—not available at 28 nm. Otherwise there will be no way to justify the added cost.


The Fine-Print Take Away

The ability to spend transistors to buy performance is absolutely vital to 20 nm SoCs for one simple reason: at the block level, 20 nm chips will not be much faster than their 28 nm equivalents. This is not immediately obvious from the publicity. TSMC, for example, claims that their 20 nm technology “…can provide 30 percent higher speed…than its 28 nm technology.” That is not the doubling we used to expect between process generations, but it is not trivial. Yet to achieve that speed on an entire block, rather than on a few critical paths, might require lavish use of low-Vt transistors with very significant leakage current, raising the issue of local-heating problems. Even without the thermal issues, the design might never close timing across all the many process, voltage, and temperature corners that 20 nm presents. Some engineers have suggested that taking power and variations into consideration, blocks simply ported to 20 nm may gain no speed at all.

http://www.altera.co.uk/technology/system-design/articles/2012/20nm-systems-era.html


So Vince, if we do create a market leading 28nm custom chip, one that can also utilise Intellishash, can we expect to retain the market-leading status for some time? This article would suggest that do you agree?

OK so if 28nm is the cap for sometime (2years forseeably??) the factor we need to asses is the size of the 28nm ASIC tech market and what portion of it we can take in terms of:
Self-mining
Chip sales
Retail miner sales