I'm with you on this P4man. Except you said asic in #1 instead of fpga. Until I see some proof of hardware I have to default to thinking this is a way to pick up sales of their FPGA units in order to fund full ASIC development and wafer runs. Notice they bring up venture funding, my best guess is venture funding+spike in sales due to swap plan are how they intend to power through the high upfront cost of getting custom silicon to retail. I also bet they are 6-12 months (not even a rough launch window announced) out and looking to slow down ASIC competitors by grabbing as much of the future market as possible, especially since volume is critical for ASIC profitability.

Taking their announced hashes/W with a bucket of salt. Big numbers a company can always backtrack on are mainly to hurt competitors.

Note, this announcement does make them, AFAIK, the only FPGA miner company to announce a swap plan for exchanging their FPGA units for eventual ASIC units.

Quote from: P4man on June 16, 2012, 07:52:19 AM

Quote from: BinaryMage on June 16, 2012, 06:43:51 AM

This strikes me as very odd. You could make a much higher profit margin. Why on earth would you price these this low?

Its not that odd; in fact it makes perfect sense for two reasons:
1) If they intend to accept preorders long before shipping the hardware, these prices will pretty much guarantee a huge backlog before the first asic miner even starts pushing up difficulty in to the stratosphere and people start realizing that $30K per TH may not be such a good move after all. The price is just low enough for people to realize that gpu and asic mining is dead and enticing those gpu/asic miners to place an order. Remember, per GH silicon cost is very close to zero.

2) it scares potential competitors. My guess is BFL has at most taped out, but not made the maskset yet. Thats why they got VC money and Im assuming thats recent. So you are looking at ~3-6 months before they have silicon, and probably another 3-6 months before they are ready to ship your first coffee warmer. This is a good time to deter potential competitors.