See that's a spiteful way of asking a straight forward question...
KnC and ORSoC are separate companies with some similar directorship.
ORSoC will have a PR nightmare if this is a scam. These aren't days of hidden dodgy dealings anymore. Social media and motivated angry consumers can do more damage to any interrelated companies than in the past...
This is not going to be a "scam". It's just that what they are promising (28nm chips, 350GH/s for $7,000, delivery in September) looks too good to be easily achieved in such a short timeframe, and they may face problems ala BFL/Avalon (because Avalon is also incurring in
huge delays, it's just that compared to BFL they shine, because at least they are delivering
something).
Everybody who has been involved in bitcoin FPGA and ASICs (including Yifu) says that it's crazy to the develop a 28nm chip at this point, in the sense that what you would save in electricity, etc. is negligible compared to the huge cost of developing 28nm technology compared to 110nm.
Then, check the lead time between the chips orders and delivery. 10 weeks in the case of Avalon, 100 days (14 weeks) in the case of BFL. I'm quite sure everybody is manufacturing at TSMC, so that's pretty much the timing for the chips - how is it possible that KNC can have everything developed for September, if they are finalizing NOW their FPGA? And to those thinking that TSMC may be faster for KNCMINER because ORSoC is involved... WAKE UP. TSMC is a company with a yearly turnover of +$10B (yes, more than 10 BILLIONS), everybody manufactures at TSMC, they won't "run" for a customer unless that customer is Apple (and maybe not even for them).
Yes, it's not like OrSOC is a company of professional ASIC design (fab-less) company or anything.
TSMC is the Fab, OrSOC does the design.
To be fair, I'm not sure if OrSOC has done a 28nm design before, but they have done many others. And it's possible it's difficult / expensive to get 28nm fab time since a number of high end companies (AMD, Nvidia, etc) use that node
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really don't see why you guys are freaking out about this -- knc miner has already put forth much more documentation and trust then any ASIC company thus far, yes, even more than avalon did when they started
When is a new company that needs its first customers who are customers and investors.
But without any warranty.
Any information is little.
It would be more fair to let investors only, until you have the finished product. Then pay the difference for our orders.
I was worried until I saw they parterned with a fairly well known fab company (OrSOC runs Opencores). Similar to Avalon, it's no suprise that a community with ties to the open source/open hardware community would be the ones to do the design. But with all respect to Avalon, i'm pretty sure that OrSOC is more specialized for this task. Avalon certainly won for getting chips out very fast at an established/mature node (110nm). KNC is now doing the next generation chip.
But yes, I wouldn't be suprised if technical issues / yield issues / time slot issues push the delivery back a few months. I don't think they'd be guilty of anything except optimism, but I do not believe it is naive optimism.
OrSOC is a legitimate semiconductor fab company trying to make a product in a market full of scammers, scumbags and shady people. It's understandable it'll be rough going at the start like this
