Yes, I'm a little disappointed. I was hoping (especially since they missed their target shipping date) that the 2TH/s figure was a very conservative estimate. But it appears it's going to be a challenge to get it there which means if they are able to achieve it, the performance/watt target my get pushed (as we've seen from other vendors), and consequently it means that there's much less potential for overclocking. I was hoping this news would come with a surprise announcement that they were already able to exceed their goal by 20% (2.4TH/s) or more much like KnC did. As the two top manufacturer's in the market, KnC is their primary competition in my opinion, and based on the results from both companies, I think I'm a bigger fan of KnC and the philosophy by which they operate.
I'm invested in both as I own a 1st batch hosted KnC Jupiter, and I have two (2) Terrahash IV (early JAN) miners coming my way soon as well. So, while I'm also very happy to see a working product, and they've done a great job overall...it seems to me they may have been a bit hasty with their performance predictions, and that's a little discouraging. This isn't a bashing rant or anything...I'm very patient, and I'm confident this will be the best product on the market for several months (which is why I ordered two).
hope you forgive the length of this answer...
its premature to know whether it will overclock (or even if cointerra will allow it). in some ways knc is responsible for setting unrealistic expectations in their customers but one thing they never did is allow their customers to overclock. not only is it forbidden but there's extra circuitry in every knc box to make it extremely hard to do.
its possible knc deliberately underquoted their specs so that they've could pleasantly surprise their customers with 'more' when they deliver - sounds great if you're a customer (and i am).. and is fantastic to hear.. but when you make it your motto, and the customers expect it (and require it).. then you're setting them up for a potential disappointment if you don't hit the same amount of over delivered performance each and every time you deliver a new product. if you make it your motto and stake your reputation to 'under promise and over deliver'... its almost a double edged sword. on the one hand, you gain a fantastic reputation because people are expecting you to over deliver.. but on the other hand, you had better over deliver by enough..! by as big a margin as you did last time, or they might not be happy about the bonus! it'll get harder each time as you approach the limits of power, cooling, technology, etc.
its difficult to engineer something that will always have power to spare. many engineers would even say that they already know in advance how fast it will go and aren't waiting 'to try it' before they find out how fast it will go. knc had a fantastic opportunity by entering a market with a properly engineered, high tech solution in a market full of amateurs and lousy engineering. but the market has changed and its no longer full of bad asic designs and amateurs. the first time you do it, you can under-quote because you know your chip is wayy better than everyone else. but when the market becomes more crowded, its a lot harder to compete. in the competitive world of pre-ordered miners, if you underquote what your box will do, you will look uncompetitive compared to the people who aren't underquoting or who are just naively optimistic (are you listening Ken?) and lose out to the people who are prepared to bend the truth (some others not to be named). I'm not saying this has ever happened...!
.. but i somewhat agree with you in that with most of the 'high power' chip people - kncminer, hashfast, cointerra and even bitmine etc... that the power delivery seems to have become more of an issue than any of them could've possibly imagined and the way they've squeezed out more performance is by improving their power circuits. ironic that the asic chips in most cases have worked first time (what are the chances!?) - whereas the power input - good old fashioned analog circuit design - has become such a 'dark art' to be solved, and required lots of tweaks to find the best solution. in some cases, like hashfast, this has taken significant amounts of time.
in cointerra's case (much like knc did) they seem to have over engineered some aspects of the design - the available power & cooling capacity... which should allow them a little room to tweak. whether there's extra margin for over clocking, i doubt it. knc doesn't let anyone overclock, for a good reason. these things are built on the limit of the rest of the circuitry. but I'm ok with cointerra taking a bit of extra time to deliver the performance they promised (especially as i am expecting a january batch, and they're not even a day late for my orders, yet, and i hope they arent).
if this was a performance car... its sold mostly on its performance compared to its peers. you can't really get away with under declaring its performance (to delight your customers with a surprise extra bonus) and still sell your high performance cars as your competitors will be saying theirs is faster, even if it won't be. knc did it once. they over delivered by a huge margin. that could easily be their motto... but now they have to over-deliver each and every time, which is really difficult to keep doing, especially when others aren't doing that. as we approach the limits of power & cooling in a home system, i don't think significant over delivery is a viable future option. in an ideal world... you engineer for what it can do, and do your best to deliver it in a reasonable time.
knc did it once. they over delivered by a huge margin. that could easily be their motto... but now they have to over-deliver each and every time
WHAT!?! No they don't...not for any reasonable customers at least.
Think about it this way...a company has a chip design and according to the theoretical models, the chip should perform at around 500Gh/s IF conditions A B and C are met. There is a statistical analysis performed on the chances of delivering on said targets and a probability matrix is compiled. I'm not a statistics expert, so I'm probably simplifying this a bit. But once this study is done, the company finds that there is a 20% chance the chip will under-perform by 20% (400GH/s), a 70% chance that the chip will meet the 500GH/s target, and a 10% chance that the chip will over-perform by 20% (600GH/s).
Now, one company decides to announce their product and begin taking pre-orders...what performance target do they publish? A less business savvy (BFL?) company might not have even performed the statistical analysis, or is looking through green colored glasses, and announces the best case scenario...thinking that somehow the stars will align and the 10% chance of complete success will come true. He announces the performance specifications of 600GH/s and the rest is history.
Another company come at the situation not counting their chickens before they hatch (KnC?), looks at the reports and thinks about how much more favorable the company will be regarded if they only announces what is relatively certain that they can attain. After announcing a 400GH/s product, they work hard to achieve & surpass that goal, but they're never under unnecessary pressure to achieve better than a "worst case scenario".
A third company sits somewhere in the middle and thinks that the chances are so good that they'll achieve the most probable result that they announce a 500GH/s part (CoinTerra). They work hard to achieve the goal, but some of the conditions A, B, or C are unobtainable for reasons outside their control, and the part shows up under-performing their expectations & announcements.
Now, you may think the third option is perfectly fine, but my contention is that the 2nd option is the only honest way to do business...without a lot of luck, because the 1st & 3rd options are are gambles. Option 1 was obviously the most risky gamble compared to the 3rd...but they were both gambles, and both hands ended coming up short. When you're playing with your own capitol, gambling may be an ethical option. But by taking pre-orders and gambling with others capitol the game changes, and the only way to do it ethically (in my opinion) is to place your bets on the most conservative options available (option 2 in my example above).
