Bitmain has been pretty open about having a farm. I don't have the address anymore, but they mine at Eligius and it has "sex" in the address. It's usually one of the top two or three on the pool.

I'm actually rather curious about what they're up to. They have hinted at releasing a second gen 28nm chip. Spondoolies is rather interesting as well, with a pre order period measured in weeks rather than months, and open accounting of their VC backing. I'm really hoping the whole "pre order" nonsense is coming to an end.

As for KNC going exclusively cloud, I think that's pretty much going to be the BTC mining paradigm from here on out. I don't particularly like that, but it is where trends are heading. And as you can see in my sig, I'm buying in at least partially. My piddling 80GH/s isn't cutting it on BTC anymore, though I'm not doing badly on alts.

I actually disagree with ConMan about the asics killing LTC/Scrypt. I think they'll give a boost to the coins with something to offer. I may be biased as I'm part of the team for Earthcoin, but I don't see this as a negative development, other than the pre order bullshit. Gridseeds, OTOH, those are cool. As the first generation of Scrypt ASIC's, they are not terrible at all. Not as fast as many had hoped, but the power consumption vs. a GPU is fantastic. And little machines like that, readily available, might just stop the huge centralization of hashpower that BTC is seeing right now. Gridseeds are likely to break below 200 a pop on the general market real soon, and I don't think they've stopped designing. Next gen ought to be interesting.

I do think the whole "coin of the day" thing is going to come to a crashing halt very soon, though. Things will have to get much more innovative, either in the mechanics or the marketing side, real soon. With 400+ coins out there, there has to be a pruning. Soon.