Thank you for this. I was considering EC2 mining and you just saved me a lot of legwork.

So quiet ?

I guess there is nothing like this going on then.

Just in case someone is interested.

You can confirm the orders I'm getting here:
https://blockchain.info/address/1FX53aWhBzZuCfsG1mE3zor5fCdWNceHRs

You will notice that one guy bought his chips first, then started selling them, and he finished a batch already. That's exactly what I wanted to do. The other guy from Europe managed to fill up a batch with no money of his own. I'm just starting. Asians are shy maybe?

BTW, at this point, if you lend me, you only need to lend me 782.1 - 57 = 725.1 with interest rate adjusted appropriately. So the sooner someone lends me, the bigger the interest he will get back later.

NOW SHIPPING!! GET YOUR ORDERS IN!!

Actually it's the software which will tell you your hashing performance, not the hardware.

Using your current hardware to check how fast it will run is risky as you don't know the process parameters of the particular part you have in the lab. It might be way faster than it's labeled speed grade. Your next production batch might not be.

Run the RTL code through Quartus. Then you run static timing analysis in Quartus and it will tell you the max clock frequency the slowest part will operate at. Multiply this with the number of hash operation the architecture can perform on each clock and you have your hash rate.

Or you have to make a design which will dynamically increase the clock speed until it fails to calculate nonces and then step down the clock until it starts to produce correct results. This is more complex as you have to make sure that timing errors don't propagate into your safe clock domain. It's also more complex to make sure your thermal solution can handle this behavior.

For power you should run a simulation of the full implementation of the design and generate a VCD (Value Change Dump) file which will show the toggle rate for all the nets in the design. This can be included in a power analysis tool like PowerPlay. This will give you a good estimate of the power consumption of the FPGA.

60W sounds like a lot for a single FPGA.

FPGAs are the smartest variation when it comes to the compromise between availability, computing power and electricity consumption.
Got my eyes on the new Lancelot.

RAM requirements. I have talked about this with some people, theoretically it is possible to fit an FPGA with additional DDR3 or GDDR5 ram and have it specifically designed to mine litecoin.

The main problem would be adoption (price) and that to get ridiculous rates of hashign power, you would need ridiculous amounts of RAM.

quantum computers!

How are you guys getting 120-130 khash/s out of GTX 460? Overclocking? Because mine is only doing around 100 khash/s.

I understand everything, but software is software and real tests are real tests.
As I said the hasrate is 1-3ghash/s, maybe little more, and the power usage is something near 60W, but I would like to put exact numbers.
With the software I don't think I could get exact numbers.

I wont stop, but I will probably be naked a lot with a fan aimed at my balls.

Too much info, I know. Sorry 

I did not find one spot where you mentioned anything about difficulty.

One day, and that day may actually never come, Intel and AMD and Nvidia and ATI will join the game (or some other really large chip company). Then we will see smaller Asics. Desktop sized machines doing 1 TH/s or DVD player sized machines doing 100 to 200 GH/s.

It's really just going to get smaller and faster, like all other technology. Just look at processors and graphics cards: compare one made today, to one made 5 years ago.

My robotics team has a few of these which we use as microcontrollers for our robots. They have a Spartan-6 LX45 FPGA inside of them, so I was wondering if it would be possible to set them up to mine bitcoins while we aren't using them.

These restrictions are absolute bullshit