Of all the companies expected to deliver by year end it's BFL with both the first expected delivery date and by far the largest quantity of units to deliver(minimum 3x). It's also BFL that is least likely to meet their time table given their past record. Maybe that means someone else ships right around the same time as BFL, and maybe that means a smaller manufacturer gives their customers a huge advantage by beating BFL's delayed delivery. Such customers would quickly meet ROI with a relatively small number of ASICs out in the wild.

There was some useful information about improving Mh/w in there. How many pages can you spend on "best flags" for a given GPU anyway? 

I'd first suggest you try flashing from a bootable optical or USB and use the -fs -fp options. I just returned a 6950 that resisted every attempt to flash from windows spitting out a plethora of errors, but flashed just fine with a win98 prompt bootable USB.

A pick and place machine is for rapidly placing surface mount devices on PC boards with precision. It's a must for any kind of in house scalable production.

A reflow oven is used to reflow solder on surface mount devices. Also a necessity for BFL if they intend to build the boards themselves in the near future, as in after their first "batch" as I understand their position at present.

...people with very little money, people that don't know bettah, people that are just getting their nose wet with mining, people that don't pay for electricity, people that live in cold climates...

BFL has been their own worst enemy. Most people are quite reasonable if you're upfront with them. The community should have found out about sonny's "colorful libertarianism" from BFL themselves.

My money is on BTCFPGA shipping first both literally and figuratively.

Thank you Avalon! I love this back and forth competition. WE WIN!

...but just like a RAID0 array 2x30 has a greater chance of failure than 1x60.

Hmmm...I can see your redundancy argument, and I agree it's somewhat valid, but that will and should occur to anyone considering investing in the technology.

That redundancy will come with the cost of likely additional shipping, likely greater power consumption, more maintenance, greater chance of failure, & more usb ports required.

Neither option is a slam dunk win.

I don't think BFL's ASIC pre-orders are a scam, but I will say that reading through their limited available information and what's available here on btctalk made me rather uneasy. IMO they began their pre-order entirely too early, they've been overly opaque, and when their reps are pressed for details they're often unprofessional and even combative.

I'm also concerned with their pre-order program's lack of clarity/confusion level. For instance if one goes to their website and pre-orders a little single sc today, one could easily be lead to conclude that the unit will be shipped within just a few weeks, but that seems very doubtful for a number of reasons.

Do you have any reason to believe that BFL is currently capable of offering the single sc @ 65GH/s? If so, is there any reason why they shouldn't offer the little single sc @ 32.5GH/s? I guess I don't really understand the point.

Did you order a single sc and are now upset that they offered a product that costs 50% as much and offers 50% of the performance?  (excepting the paltry $1 difference which would be eaten by shipping & power consumption differences anyway)

Hullo...

COMPLETELY

        +

   BADASS

...or so I've recently heard. K, I dunno what that means either and would also appreciate an explaination in English.

No worries, enjoy the downtime. I asked a Q a couple pages back, but I'll fire off an email at some point. Low priority stuff.

That was *NOT* a concise summary of evidence, but thanks OP, I was just about to trigger a pre-order and now don't feel comfortable.

Please don't tell me there's a thread like this about BTCFPGA/cablepair.

Humor = fail I guess.

Don't care who he ordered from or if he ordered at all. Matter fact I was considering adding a BFL order. Just struck me funny. 

Don't actually. I believe I saw his nick in the BFL pre-order thread. Kind of ironic that the only one compiling a list of bASIC pre-orders ordered from BFL.

Couldn't help but notice...your name isn't on your own list crazy.

I'm on the fence here. The only thing I'm sure of is that if I do pre-order it will be from Tom's outfit. I've appreciated the transparency.

I have one question though Mr. Tom, and I don't know if it's been asked/answered previously. If I go ahead and order a 27Gh unit, is it possible to upgrade it to a 54Gh unit at a later time? I mean prior to shipping that is?