Im only just looking in to this company, so bear with me.
IPO:
The 28 nm chips are not going to be particularly good. It's not a custom design (BitFury showed how than can change things a lot). And yet, custom design for 28 nm is on the way.
Today even 65nm chips provide sellers a gigantic markup. Having "bad" 28nm available at cost before almost anyone else cant be a bad thing.
While eAsic can certainly supply a lot of chips, we have no idea at what cost.
True; but you can make educated guesses based on this chart:
http://www.easic.com/Spatr7ve/website-wp1/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Managing-Risk-and-Cost-Nextreme-NEW-ASIC-to-Standard-Cell-ASIC-Migration-v056.jpgGranted its for the previous generation, but should give us some idea. The point were traditional cell based asics become cheaper than easic's nextreme is between 300 and 900K units according to them. Lets put it at 500K for arguments sake. That would mean 500K chips from AM would cost about the same as it would cost cointerra/KNC etc (although KNC is likely using a similar process) including NRE.
500K is a pretty decent amount that represents many millions of dollars in hardware sales (and/or mining revenue).
Total market cap was simply very high for an IPO. It looked more like the price it should have if everything goes well than the price it should be for such a risky market.
I could use some help here. What is their market cap? On btct I see 7,531. Is that right? ~$1M doesnt seem all that much to me. The asic design and masksets cost more and are worth a whole lot more if they can bring this to market this year.
There seem to be no particular valuable in-house competence; you'd have to wonder what is the value of a company only outsourcing.
Fair point. OTOH, this approach does have it advantages too, the work is more likely to be done by people who have experience and a clue, even if you have to pay them a premium. Given the nature of this market, paying a premium for hiring people's skill is not something to be avoided IMO.
The selling of shares was very weirdly done. (I don't remember exactly.)
ITs addressed in their faq, and seems like a reasonable/honest mistake.
Anyway, Im seriously considering investing in this. I just want to find out a little more on how they intend to turn chips in to miners. Who is doing the PCBs, the software etc?