Quote from: freddyfarnsworth on May 23, 2014, 03:17:20 AM

I will stay busy reading all those new links just posted, lots of good stuff therein,,,,
Did find the reason all are struggling, noone wanted to share info, till lately.
with a 6month lifespan on high end equiptment, they have no time to act like that.
Community shared it would have gone much faster.

Can't disagree there. But... Community & business rarely make good bedfellows.

I design very very expensive industrial systems for a living.
A good part of their market is for chip making. Because the product is in front of the bleeding edge I am often brought in nearly from day-one of our customers customer asking, "Can we do this...?". (Usually after informing them of what it will entail - yes. I love challenges).

The folks who commissioned the ASIC's be they Bitmine/InnoSilicon, Cointerra, BFL or whoever aside from Bitmaintech seem to have gone to the Underpants Gnomes school of business. Look it up. It's actually an oft used term Cheesy

In this case it goes:
step-1: Make chips for miners
step-2: ? ? ?
step-3: Profit!

The step-2 that is missing is design what *uses* the chip.

Point is I am damn certain of what will need to be addressed for my equipment & process to work 24x7x365 for years and often decades. Why am I certain? Because I and my company have been constantly researching future needs and at our expense already done all the groundwork. My customers are telling me they want to spend several million dollars a year bringing in our systems and I need to be certain the design will work. Period.

Yes chips delay hurt massively but more to the point those selling chips did nothing to actually *use* the chips in-house. After that release true engineering samples along with test boards. IF I have the timeline for the A1 right it went from a 1 to 2 chip reference pretty much conceived of/gotten to work in the dev & DIY threads in about a month (Jan-Feb) and then straight to 'production' with 8 chips. Of course the 1st versions have problems. eg. the multiple SPI slave chain matter. The entire design was never characterized to begin with. Just get it running... I understand the pressures that the pre-order syndrome brought on but hell, they threw a baby into battle!

At least it seems InnoSilicon/Dragon & Technobit saw what they actually had to deal with and addressed it better then those who relied on the BitMine design team.