I believe they taped out the final design of the BE300 in mid/late december and it's already submitted, the masks have been fabricated and the chips are in production right now. Come on, FC knows his job, man
this isn't a case of friedcat not knowing what he's doing. Of course he knows what he's doing, which is WHY he might not have placed a huge multi million dollar order at a time when bitcoin is very low priced. He may be waiting to see what happens to the price of bitcoin, and he may also be tweaking the design, after seeing the sample chips, to make it as good as it can be before he hits the button on producing millions of them.
im not in any way accusing FC of not knowing what he's doing. quite the contrary, he KNOWS what he's doing, so he may not have taped out yet. The economics for spending millions making a new bitcoin mining chip are a much tougher decision today than ever in the last 18 months.
If the man in the street can buy bitcoins, at retail, for less than it costs to mine them... then you've seriously got to question whether its worth producing mining chips and other equipment.
and its a different decision for cloud mining as the economics are different if the product isn't intended to be sold at retail and can be operated in a low cost geo location (iceland etc) and host them them at scale to bring the cost down. but then, everyone is not keen on cloud mining right now as there are too many scams and not enough evidence of actual mining going on.