It's good to see something happening on development front.

If they attach a few PH/s to could this swamp p2pool though? Won't this cause share difficulty to rise and push out smaller miners even more quickly than at present?

I had been thinking about how to minimize the impact of wide ranges of hashrates to help smaller miners reduce their volatility. Like enforcing variable difficulty levels to target a small number of shares so there is room for more individual miners in the PPNS payout.

Maybe Bitmain have thought about all this and are incorporated something to preserve the p2p nature when you have one node (or a few collected ones) which are much bigger than others.

Will be interesting to see what they are up to.