Well, just nvidia always sucks hard.

Yeah but $600 CREDIT for equipment ( that can come in 4-6 weeks ) is not = $300 cash right now in my bank account.

Just like MtGox USD does not equal USD already in my bank or how cellphone credit does not equal currency in Africa.

Tell me that I was right and I will run away and die a happy man.....

Yes but anybody that is paying $600 for a single right now will be able to recuperate the costs before reward halving and ASIC coming ( Dec 2012 ) ?

AND THERE WE HAVE IT.....

Another win by BFL.

They could have completely screwed their customers and not offer any trade in so value of single with ASIC coming = maybe $10.

Now this basically ensures the value of the single is at least $300 which is excellent for some who are half way through paying off the unit and want to sell right now and stop gambling.

Again, IM not sure I see the point. Say I plunged a few million dollar on making that maskset, and Im struggling to recover my investment. Why would I let you run a few wafers? Even if I did, and charged you an arm and a leg for it, since you have to run them through the same fab as me, its really the same thing as selling you the processed wafers, and assuming you dont want to duplicate the costs for testing, packaging etc, you would really just be buying my chips.

And whats the benefit of doing so, to anyone? The RTL we already have (well, more or less), anything beyond that like the synthesis and  place and route will be covered by NDAs, but even if they werent, it would only be useful at one specific fab using one particular process and its usefulness would be limited to someone nearly doubling the NRE by ordering pretty much the exact same maskset. If this chip arrives 6+ months after BFL, I would be surprised if they could recover the costs of one design and maskset, anyone trying to do the same another 6 months later is completely out of his mind. "Opensourcing" stuff like PCB design is almost equally pointless, the PCB will be utterly tied to the asic.

I think many people here would like to see BFLs bitstream and have people improve on it, and therefore think opensource hardware is somehow good, but that only works for FPGAs. Once this asic has taped out, any brilliant idea anyone might have to improve on it will be useless.

Anyway, I dont think this is the biggest hurdle this project has ahead of it. Im my mind, Ive started making a list of "bitcoin tops and flops of 2012", and I fear this project will feature in the latter list, along with Diablo's $1M Mining corporation, Vladimirs "huge" asic mining company and a few other pies in the sky. But I guess we'll see.

I don't know if I believe this post since on the BFL press release it says very clearly ---

"Because our first and second generation equipment is expected to be outpaced very quickly by the new hardware, customers who have purchased earlier generation products will be able to trade them in at 100% of their value toward the purchase of SC-generation hardware."

It would be nice if BFL would come here and explain this in their own words rather than hear it from a 3rd party.

You mean that posting in Discussion didn't come to mind so that BadBear would have something to do, like moving said thread to Off-topic? (I dare you!)

So word on the street is the Xeon Phi is supposed to be directed to compete with the nVidia Tesla presence in the supercomputer market? Seems like a bit of a war will roll out: x86 vs CUDA vs OpenCl? Did AMD stop developing Firestream cards?

Its time for a reality check; if you have yet to select a fab and process, you cant even have taped out yet, much less have a maskset. What you do have is an FPGA design that might be ported to a process, but that still needs to be done, the analog part probably still needs to be done, the design must be tested, characterized and validated for that process,  then you have to order the maskset, wait for it to be produced, then you have to order the wafers, wait for wafer processing, you have to get the chips cut, packaged and tested, design and order and test the PCBs, do Q&A, software, etc.

IOW, you are as far as BFL would have been 9 (or more likely 12) months ago. How in the world do you expect to beat them to market?

No offense Gusti, but by your own admission you have no experience in the semi conductor industry and you seem to be treating this as the purchase of a car or something, asking around quotes and expecting to place an order and be done with it. Even for a structured ASIC it wouldnt be quite that simple, but the development process of a custom asic is a lot more complicated than that, and I would feel a lot more confident in the outcome of your project if someone was involved that has any experience designing, producing and bringing to market a digital design of any kind. I know thats not you, nor Jason, so I would urge you to bring someone on board who has that experience. Now you could outsource all of that (prepare for a shock when you get the quote and tentative planning) but then you wouldnt be negotiating with fabs like you say you are.

As for the business aspect of this; you may call it opensource or community driven, but what does that even mean if you are simply a company that will fund the NRE to develop and sell another asic? I fail to see the big difference with BFL.  If the community aspect of this will be the funding, good luck raising the $1+M you would need to come to market with a product that will start a price war with BFL (and potentially others) who will already have recovered their NRE and because of their early sales, will have pushed up difficulty to a point where your asics will be worth only a fraction of what they could be worth today.

I may be missing something, and I hope Im wrong, but I just dont see how this is going to fly.