1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
1) Yes scrypt mining is pretty mature and popular. There are more than enough people investing in GPUs and tuning them to get the peak performance. If you made a good FPGA scrypt miner at the right price, people would buy them.
2) Just answered that. If your FPGA miner was well priced per hash, used less power per hash, and was neat and tidy to coordinate people would go for it.
3) Would pre-order to fund prototyping, but once you had development boards with guys like Kano who could review and give an opinion I would pre-order to help fund the building of a batch of chips and boards.
My reason for this point to pre-order:
-scam avoidance
-knowledge of a time frame and proven performance. Just look at BFL. Completely screwed up both the period of time to finish the design, then completely screwed up the time line to production, then completely screwed up on end performance. If somebody like Kano would turn around and say "boards look good for X/Y/Z performance software should be finalised soon and board designs look mature enough for production" then I'm happy to part with some cash.
-somebody else might come along with a better offer while you are trying to get to market. I'll hold onto my coins until I know I'll get the best product in the short term.
Now if you went for a raffle - no way. If I front money right away before somebody else who waits til the week before shipping I should get my gear before they do. If that means the poor cheap risk less baby has to wait a long time, tough so did I from when I put in.
If you went for auctions- no way. Set a competitive price where you are confident you will sell at the rate you can build them, and let me decide if I see that as what I want to spend. I don't want to have to wait for ever until the cash up idiots out there have run out of life savings before I'm willing to spend a more sensible amount. No doubt Auctions are better for sellers when demand is hot, but it doesn't impress me as a buyer.
I would support a limit per customer would make more sense than 1. However you could always order via a friend's/family member's card and address to make more orders.
What would impress me as a price? Well you can get a 7950 for $300 which can easily hash at 600mhs, so that is 50c a mhs. You will still need a host system for a GPU as well as a FPGA board, just you can run more FPGAs per host ultimately. It is likely by the time these FPGAs launch that the 8950 will be out which promises lower power and probably a little more speed (I hear power is more the concern currently). So you would be best to target at most 50c per mhs.
Again a 7950 as the target means 250W for 600mhs -> 2.5mhs per W. You could assume a 8950 might be closer to 3mhs per W. So to impress me on the power front you'd want to be well better than 3mhs per W.
I like the idea of a FGPA with decent ram performance as it opens it up for other uses later. An ASIC could only be used for mining or scypt work, but an FPGA could be used for all sorts of scientific applications later and hence actually have some good resale later. Their flexibility and potential is far higher than low/no ram spartan boards etc.