[IMPORTANT UPDATE]As an update, we have applied here to be an alpha-tester for bitfury's newly fabbed 65nm chips:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=228677.msg2407907#msg2407907This is an exciting development for us, especially as like everyone else we are waiting on Avalon chip samples from zefir (we have chips in zefir batches #2 and #4, and more chips in SebastianJu's batch #2).
I (stripykitteh) have been following Bitfury's progress over the last couple of months and I have increasing confidence that his chips will work and set new performance benchmarks in SHA256 ASICs; in fact I've pre-ordered one of the 120GH/s miners metabank.ru from BitCentury (I ordered one within a few hours of their thread going up):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226846.0Bitfury may independently decide who to allocate chips to; however he has raised the possibility of a forum poll to decide. If the poll eventuates we will definitely post instructions on how to find the poll and vote for us.
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
At this stage if we do obtain bitfury's chips, after we participate in the alpha testing program we would adapt them into our 'larvae' trays, probably
either 8 or 16 4 chips per tray (20GH/s per tray). A fully populated 3RU miner could do 320GH/s; which is certainly impressive by today's standards. Daemondazz has already taken a preliminary look at bitfury's specs and expects we can simplify the tray design a fair bit (no CPLD required). We'd need a 500MHz clock instead of 32MHz, but apart from that we can't foresee any new technical hurdles to leap.