So they are going to ship out just a few to try and quell the angry customers while making another excuse for an extended delay yet again.
Sounds and looks familiar.
I am not surprised.
Where is Monarch?
Here's today's BFL update:
Engineering work continues on the Monarchs. We have a stable 600 GH/s board hashing currently, without any major issues.
Over the past week, we have been diagnosing an issue with heat on the boards and finally located the culprit. With the Imperial class product, the board begins to overheat without extended cooling measures. The board was originally designed for 350w. At 600 GH/s, the board works as designed, since the power usage and current is within the design parameters. In the Imperial class boards, the power and current requirements are substantially more than it was designed for. There is a common copper power plane in one of the layers of the board which is inadequate to carry the amount of current required. As such, it starts to heat up the board to unacceptable levels and would shorten it's life. Because of this, we have to create a new revision of the board that will have a much more robust copper plane that will allow 4x the amount of current as the current plane, while letting the board run much cooler. These new revision boards are in the manufacturing process right now and we expect them to come out of manufacturing around 6 - 9 of June.
In the meantime, we have a number of the 600 GH/s boards available and they are being prepped for deployment. I have proposed that to get the hashing power out to customers as fast as possible, we offer Mining By the Gigahash to the customers that have orders in the queue, in order date sequence. We will supply each user with hashing power for each card ordered. Customers that receive the MBGH wouldl have use of the hashrate until their revised 1 TH cards are ready to ship. This will allow our customers to start hashing right away while we wait on the revised boards to make their way through manufacturing, packaging and shipping. We are looking into the feasibility of this and whether or not we can deploy the cards in enough time to make this effective, as it entails quite a bit of work on our end to make sure this goes smoothly, works properly and everyone gets what they are suppose to.