May 27, 2014
Greetings Miners! After long consideration, lengthy negotiations with our vendors/partners and downright demands being placed from our side in light of competitiveness within the market we have decided to further cut our profit margins and are extraordinary pleased to announce that we will be packing more hash power into your batch 1 devices (whilst scaling power accordingly so not Continue Reading
What is the date today ? August 10
and counting
7 weeks to go.
Having spoken to some people experienced in ASIC design, is that it's at least 8-12 weeks from tapeout to delivery of first silicon, and at least another 2-3 weeks will be needed for PCB assembly, testing, shipping between factories, etc.
This means that when they made the announcement of 27 May, they must have already known that their tapeout had failed, and there would be a delay of months for the design to be modified and to go through the full sign-off verification process.
It's quite brazen really. They even had the cheek to ask for final payment in July stating that shipping was on track for July.
The overall project seems catastrophically badly managed. At this point, they should have mechanical samples of the PCBs for testing in the enclosure (same mechanical shape and size, with the same heatsinks, etc.) It's also been nearly 2 weeks since they had the ballout for the ASICs, which means that they should have a completed miner PCB design, in order to ensure that production delays don't compromise manufacture after arrival of the ASICs. They've been making a big song and dance about completing the power distribution PCB design - so I'd have expected the completion of the miner PCB to be being broadcast from the rooftops.
Heck, even the case design shown looks like a joke - there's no way that you'll get 2 kW of silicon cooled in that. Again, they should really have had some test PCBs with dummy loads on, for testing the thermal situation by now.