I wish they had specified their defition of high volume. It probably would have saved them a lot of PMS and emails, and given us an idea of the requirements for consideration.
I would hazard a guess and say 5 - 10,000. It really doesn't make sense to supply chips in the 10's or 100's, and if they did, it would be through a third party that is buying 1000's, i.e. a distributor, so it's extremely unlikely that you'll be able to buy 10 of these for $64 ($0.5 per gigahash) probably more like $200 ($1.5 per gigahash). That doesn't in any way make them bad value, quite the contrary, but I think that a lot of miners have expectations that they're going to be able to put together a rig for $0,5 per gigahash, and that's simply not going to happen.
Perhaps Asicminer could have worded their initial pitch slightly differently, but good on them for going against the herd and making the most of existing, cheap technologies. True Value Engineering.
