Like everything that Bitfury announces you have to read very carefully, I refer to: "We understand it will be nearly impossible for any older technology to compete .......". The 'nearly' is the giveaway, despite their strange announcement about 'every transistor on the new chip being laid out by hand' they know that ultimately their solution, for one reason or another, has not worked exactly to plan and that a good full custom 28nm design can beat the crap out of it. Such solutions exist.
How is every transistor on the new chip being laid out by hand a "strange announcement"? Hello, welcome to the definition of FULL CUSTOM DESIGN.
Care to explain how a full-custom 28nm design like the BM1385 used in the S7 can compete effectively after the halfing against a chip that has demonstrated over twice the efficiency and should still be PROFITABLE by then (it's looking more and more likely that the S7 is going to hit "unprofitable" shortly before the halfing unless you have VERY VERY cheap or FREE electric).
BitFury's real competiton for their new chip isn't going to be 28nm. It is going to be the upcomming A3, and at some point probably a 14/16nm full-custom chip from Bitmain, and possibly 1 or 2 others eventually going with full-custom at 14/16nm.
I get fed up saying this but people should read a lot more before shooting their mouths off. No one has laid a chip out by hand since the late 1970's - probably about the time your parents were born. This statement was just another piece of bullshit from Bitfury trying to make their chip sound 'special' in some way.
If you want some real, actual informed data about what full custom actually entails then I'm happy to recommend some very good books to you to help reduce your level of ignorance, you clearly don't really understand what full custom means or entails or what good engineers can do with it.
I'll bet that Bitmain make a lot of money on their S7's and could probably reduce it's price to sub $600 and still make a profit, so they have no real need in the near future to make a new chip (although I'm sure they will). They'll continue to make money on their 28nm cash cow for some time. They might even conjure up a containerised system of their own......
Hint.
*I* was born quite a bit before the 1970s - in fact, I was already in the Navy by the "late 1970s".
Gratuitous insults with zero factual basis just make YOU look stupid and make people tend to ignore anything else you have to say.
You might want to keep "lead time" in mind - Bitmain certainly is, since they announced that they were already working on a 14/16nm design in the SAME ANNOUNCEMENT where they originally announced the S7.
Doesn't mean they won't keep selling as many of their current design as they can while it's still profitable to do so, but if they were to wait to start designing the next generation like Avalon has already said they plan to do, Bitmain wouldn't have anything to compete for a long time.
BTW - you STILL haven't addressed my question about how Bitmain (or whoever) is supposed to be competative to the 14/16nm gear after the halfing kills the profitability on anything less efficient.