It is my understanding that the current generation of ASICs all get around 100MH/joule give or take a few million hashes. While that is upwards of 20x more efficient than GPU mining, how much more can be pushed out? Given we understand exactly the operation needed, does anybody know what the minimum amount of energy that could possibly be expended to perform SHA256?
Do you know what Moore's law is?
Something that hardly applies to bitcoins. Makes sense for the microprocesser market worth tens of billions of dollars (maybe into the hundreds of billions)
When your NRE for an ASIC runs several million or tens of millions of dollars, you have to make a financial decision if it's worth the investment, risk, and design/lead times for a marginal improvement over what already exists
Look at it this way : Asic Miner is a 100% capitalist, maximize profit type of organization. They used, what, 110 or 130nm node for their fab? You could get much better power efficency and hashrates with a smaller process, but it's far more expensive and complicated. They have no plans to change node, they're bringing 262 THash/sec online with their 110nm in the next 3 months. A massive investment that shows they're dedicated to what they've got.