In this case it is set to 10 BTC paid every hour, as long as the balance is big enough.
Got it. So the big unknown then is how big the balance is. Based on the block find rate on BTCGuild, I'm pretty sure it is wrong to assume AM has 13 PH.
They had 60 PH worth of chips, and the only reason they'd sell chips is if the margin on the sale exceeded revenues from using the chips for mining. Use the example of stock futures, replacing "futures" with "chips" and "stock" with "BTC". So in the end, a good measure of how profitable a chip manufacturer/seller is would be a "reseller ratio" of mining+sales over the equivalent mining output for the quantity of chips over a period of time (note that this would neglect added, responsive hashrate by competing miners).
Can we add this metric to any shareholder communications policies that are put in place in the future? It would be interesting to see this ratio for each generation of chips that are produced.