BitFury (Valery Nebesny) attempted to do async, domino logic 55nm 5 engine scrypt chip and failed.
That's actually incorrect info. You should sack the Mossad agent working for you
There are two all important parameters in Bitcoin ASICs:
GH/mm^2 - Capex and J/GH - Opex
Glad you brought that up! GH/mm^2 + J/GH is exactly the game we've been winning since the FPGA era.
With extreme design techniques, sub 0.1 J/GH is possible also on 28nm processes, the question is what will be the GH/mm^2 - miner cost.
What also counts is how much money you need to put down to have that chip hashing for you. I believe we're the leader in that as well.
Whenever BitFury gives efficiency numbers (J/GH), they never give the all important GH/mm^2 numbers.
Why would we give such revealing information to our competitors? And I don't really understand why the end user even needs to know about this? He cares for $/GH and J/GH and delivery times. GH/mm^2 is engineering porn. Our figures are NSFW
When they're selling hosted hash-rate of their 28nm machines to their customers, they claim the machine efficiency is 0.35 J/GH
Source?
It's baffling why you don't see the significance of GH/mm2 in the context of this discussion. Your company surely understands the advantages of running chips at low voltage and if you have a hashing engine running at the minimum energy point then it's possible to get some truly amazing efficiency. Trouble is, you then need multiple engines to get any speed.
That's why Guy's GH/mm2 metric is significant. You might also like to read this excellent paper by Tran and Baas that demonstrates very clearly the concept of minimum energy points although I'm guessing it's probably old news to you. Yes, I know it's for a 32 bit adder but the principle is still valid for SHA256 (which in any case uses 32 bit adders in the main pipeline and word generator)
http://web.ece.ucdavis.edu/~anhttran/files/papers/atran_icce10_adder.pdfAs for engineering porn, what you are currently offering isn't porn, it's more like burlesque where it' all tease. I don't think anyone believes the figures you released other than a crude attempt to worry your competitors and maybe dissuade them from building more capacity. Just like the statement one of your engineers made about everyone else being 18 months behind you, it's insulting their intelligence and
demeaning their abilities.
Personally, I would 100 times more trust what previous Intel engineers say can be done than a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs - unless the latter can actually prove how big their balls are.