I wonder now practical it would be to pursue both Nextreme and Easicopy in parallel in terms of our resources?
Off the top of my head, we have $6M in customer order money (minus refunds) that we can't touch until those orders are fulfilled. Putting that money aside, the BTC/USD exchange rate rose 50% between July (2nd IPO) and August (NRE paid). Since NRE was $1M, we should have had about $0.5M in change if not more, which has since risen by over 800% to atleast $4M.. that's enough money to pay for 4 more NREs.
Does anyone know if the chips can be put on any board or will the chip buyers also need to buy our custom boards too?
Not sure, but it would be in Ken's interest to make sure developers can use the chips, possibly by open-sourcing the necessary information. This is
what Avalon did, and is what would have allowed Ken to make Avalon clones (should their chips have arrived). I'd imagine he could do this while still keeping certain parts proprietary (such as Intellihash and the likes).
Nice digging, lucky I caught it in this maelstrom of trolling. Pretty much confirmed what I thought, however, it also strongly suggests my earlier hypothesis is correct: nextreme 3 is not ready. Your links refer to nextreme 2. No reason to assume the flow is any different, even the timing will be pretty much identical, but try to find any information or PR or whatever on Nextreme 3 on easic's site and you will draw a blank. ebeam might only take hours, but if you dont have prefabricated nextreme 3 wafers to apply the ebeam process to, that doesnt help you.
Thanks. Since there is only one Easicopy section and multiple Nextreme sections (90nm, 45nm and "coming soon" 28nm), I'm
guessing the process applies equally to them all. I don't expect to see the 28nm literature on their website (or elsewhere due to NDA) until after Seagate and/or VMC make it to market. Here's hoping they are ready for us...
