December 2015, Lketc / Innosilicon, from reading between the lines of some of the stuff they've already announced.

 Pretty close to 2016 though - and it's not fully optimised 16nm so won't be better efficiency (per their announced specs) than the SP50 and only a hair better to the same as the S7.

 I'm mostly just hoping it ignites a serious price war.

 The KnC and Bitfury announcements were only for tapeout - though it appears they have done fully optimised designs, not "cell based" stuff that's less efficient.
 I suspect KnC has been rolling theirs for a short while, but are having yeild issues.
 Bitfury probably won't have production chips till sometime mid-to-late 2016.

 Spondoolies claims .15J/GHs for their new 28nm chips, which narrows the margin quite a bit but you better have SERIOUS money if you ever want any of that hardware.

Anyone else having issues getting to the Hashnest website at all?

 (edit) it fixed - and PACMIC v3 IS STILL (or is again) available, 30000 TH available per my JUST looking at it (0521 CDT 21Sep2015)

*NIX is more common than you think.

 Pretty much every router "appliance" runs some form of LINUX (Cisco is the only major exception, they have their own propriatary OS stuff).

 Most of the Internet runs on some sort of *NIX - the exceptions are mostly (again!) Cisco boxes in the bigger routers.

 Many older smartphones run on a *NIX of some sort, though propriatary seems to be making a comeback lately with Android getting popular.

 Do keep in mind that the Mac OS is *NIX under the hood.

 To get technical, Windows "borrowed" a LOT of *NIX design concepts in the NT series and it's later derivations, and somewhat to a lesser degree MS-DOS and consumer Windows versions did as well. MS-DOS also borrowed heavily from the older DEC RT-11 OS though (both RT-11 and UNIX borrowed from older OSs as well).

Gross income /= profit.

 Just because a S5 might be pulling in close to 0.01 bitcoin a day does NOT make that 0.01 it's PROFIT - and as the electric cost for most folks doesn't change more than once a year, every 1% loss in GROSS INCOME usually represents quite a bit higher lost PROFIT.
 The only exception to that is if your electric is FREE (or effectively free, like you have electric heat and you're using your S5 to do part of your heating, WHILE you need the heat).

 The current diff drop is a very short-term phenomon related to Bitmain shipping a bunch of S7 units they sold (and obviously were mining with before they sold them), rate will buck back up and then some once the buyers recieve them and get them back online.

Waste of money for badly outdated stuff.

I suspect Bitmain's real competiton will show up around December - Lktec powered by Innosilicon.

 I'd be happy for Spondoolies to prove me wrong though.

 OP asked for modern, not "already outdated by late 2014 technology standards".

 Both the S5 and the Spondoolies "rockerbox" based machines blew away anything Bitcrane made.

 
 For "winter use only electric sorta-portable heater" usage, any miner will work.

I think the device is a joke.

 I'm still holding judgement on 21 itself, the mining chip(s) IN the joke device appears that it might have some decent specs.

I'd wait not so much on 16nm, but on "what other companies come out with to compete with the S7" right now.

Bitfury and KnC aren't going to be selling to the public, and BitFury in particular isn't going to be selling 16NM at all for months at best (they just announced tape-out earlier this month, it takes MORE months sometimes a year+ to get working production hardware from that point).

usb connections. Bloody unreliable long-term, nothing more than an IRRITATION.

Excessive power levels per unit.
The 600W ballpark the S5 was was fairly nice, gave lots of options for powering them.
The 1200+ of the S7 is way too high for a "home" miner.

Modular design actually tends to INCREASE the cost overall, though the flexability can be nice *IF* you can get the hashing boards seperately at a resonable fraction of the cost of an entire unit.

*IF* you are going to use an integrated PSU, use something with a STANDARD size, not something propriatary with very few options to replace it when it dies.
Better yet, do NOT use an integrated PSU, gives the end user more options.

Rack mount case sizing is ... not really a good idea for a home miner, unless you don't mind wasting LOTS of space on at least 3U form factor.
Cooling in 2U is a pain, cooling in 1U is a MAJOR pain, and the fans get LOUD for decent airflow at anything less than 3U (you can fit 120mm fans in a 3U form factor case).

Massive single chip miners are a pain, and tend to be very inflexable on usage of the chips.

 Don't even get me started on the very poorly designed power control circuitry on the Gridseed stuff - if you want examples of HOW NOT TO DO THINGS just look at everything Gridseed did (except chip reliability, that was pretty good). BAD board design to the n'th degree, the whole stupid "mine 2 different algorythms on one chip" idiocy that they have continued into the SFARDS iteration....

I don't see this "first product" being of intrest to many folks. WAY too low on performance, WAY too espen$ive, even for a "development tool" it's bloody overpriced.

 I've got to wonder what the REAL "intended use" for this thing is, the comments 21 has made on it so far make exactly ZERO sense to me.
 Technology demonstrator perhaps?

PACMIC v3 contracts aren't likely to "sell out" as Bitmain keeps replenishing them to the 30000 (appx) available level.

 They MIGHT stop offering them once they switch to a v4 (S7 "based" type) contract.

 Can't mine altcoins (for the most part) with a SHA256 miner - and none of the few altcoins that DO use SHA256 return noticeably better and are generally LOWER return than Bitcoin mining is in value per GH.

In my experience, USB connections are noticeably more reliable (though still get flaky occasionally) on LINUX machines.

 Slackware in my case, been using it since shortly after Yggdrasil "apparently" died (Yggdrasil eventually put out ONE more version of their distribution, about 2ish years after I'd already switched, THEN died).

 Nah, if they're smart they'll dust off the units before they ship them.

 They did at least that much on my officially "used" S5s.

I'd actually guess "price adjust" - they're always "sold out" for a while when they adjust the price.

I forget what the EU/USD exchange rate is, but assuming 1:1 that would be about 10 cents/KWH - and a bit on the expensive side to mine with at this time unless you can get your mining hardware CHEAP.

 S7 uses half the electric (appx.) per GHS that a S5 does.

eats more than 1 watt per GHs = loss unless you have free or near-free electric.

 Waste of time and money as a general rule.

2Ghs is totally worthless for the current Bitcoin market. Anything old enough to be THAT low on mining rate is going to eat more electric than you make in Bitcoin by quite a bit, unless you have FREE electric or only plan to use it in the winter a space heater (effectively free electric).

 Even the sidehack/novak stick miner has pretty close to zero chance to achieve RoI if you have to pay for your electric - and it's the best "stick" miner available by a wide margin at this time.


 SHA256 miners can NOT be used to mine non-SHA256 coins like Litecoin (or Dark or Doge etc). For Litecoin and Doge you need a Scrypt miner, for Dark at this point there are no ASIC at all (dunno if Dark is mineable at a profit with GPUs but that's the only way you have a prayer of doing so).