There is a little new information in Ravi's quote:
Another key thing to note, added Iyengar, is that our GoldStrike1 ASIC itself is very high performance and meets and exceeds the published spec. It is the board level power circuit inefficiencies which reduced the overall performance marginally. However, as stated above we are getting closer and closer to the spec with improvements that we are doing on the board."
So perhaps they were accurate when they reported their 132 GH/s/die. If true, I'm guessing the tinkerers out there will be able to get plenty of further performance out of the under-speced units, much like October KNC units.
of course it's possible, but highly speculative, that they have decided to do a quick board redesign before they ship the first December units - I think the turnaround on a new board could be just a few days if they really act quickly. This would explain the delay in shipping the first units. This is just complete guesswork though.
Will
turning around a new board doesn't take time. what takes time is buying new components that weren't in the old board. that could be weeks.
im assuming that any tweaks that they can make to the hardware and software are with the existing board and are tweaks that could be made to any of our boxes (possibly even after they've shipped them to us)... and they said that a later batch (march? april?) will get the benefit of the next board design that is completely different... and that probably also explains why they continue to claim 2 TH/s on their web site (because they're selling the may batch which is far enough away that they know they will have finished their tweaking, AND had a new board in production by then)
I'm still optimistic that the tweaks they can make will improve the box further and get it closer to the goal. since two weeks ago when it was 1.5 TH, and last week when the 1st customer got one hashing at 1.7 TH thats already a decent improvement.. and if we can get the benefit of further tweaks it could be 1.75 or 1.8 before long.
Sure, I agree with you but I'm just not sure it can fully explain the further delays in getting the first Dec units shipped, other than an attempted redesign... after all if they work on the firmware they can always roll out firmware updates afterwards, like KNC did.
I also agree that by the time they ship units that people are paying for now, they will reach the 2Th, so putting 2Th on their website isn't disingenuous at all.
Will
Will