Divs should start to come in before "assembled" miners are ready from re-sellers. AM is selling chips this time around (Avalon business model), so it would be crazy to think that they will not have a good number of their own miners assembled, running and tested before they release the chips to the public market. That would fall in line with AM getting their first batch of chips (still a large batch) at the end of this month, 1-2 weeks until they have their first miners up and running. That would give them a few weeks to test and finalize everything before 3rd party assembled miners start hitting the public sale market through resellers.
tl;dr - A May release to the general public sounds about right. Shareholders should start to see increased dividends at the beginning of April when AM has their own 3rd gen hardware up and mining, and divs will steadily increas in the weeks after as they deploy more of their own hardware/franchise and they sell chips.
+1
I am hoping FC gets the entire immersion cooled datacenter mining on gen3 before mass chip sales begin just to give a little extra btc while the difficulty is low.
I would expect the very first batch of hardware to be air cooled because they are going to have to test/debug it and adding the intricacies of immersion cooling wouldn't make sense. Once the "burn in period" is over (maybe a week or so), I would expect the hardware to slowly be moved to the immersion cooling racks. Not only is this good for shareholders with divs, but as a strategic move for AM it is the only possible option. As chip manufacturers refine their designs and move to a smaller chip architecture, there will be no noticeable difference between an AM chip and a XXX chip. At this point, companies are going to have to add some value that makes their mining operation more appealing to investors/customers. It wouldn't be out of the question to see immersion cooled rigs for the consumer which are cooled with mineral oil similar to the way people cooled PCs in the late 90's and early 2000's. On a more macro scale, it makes sense for AM to franchise as many immersion facilities as possible because they offer the most "bang for their buck".
tl;dr - Yes, it would be awesome for shareholders if they got immersion up and running as quickly as possible and that seems like the most logical path they would take. It is also in their best interest to continue their growth in immersion cooling and into expanding their supply channels at full speed in order to ensure they will stay a few steps ahead of the competition moving forward.