Let's take bets on the day when the first 100 Monarchs (the bullet run) go out the door.
How long will it take to get 100 x 300 Gh/s Monarch in customers hands? Let us go off of what BFL posted.
https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage-new-products/300-gh-bitcoin-mining-card.htmlTape out has not been completed so customers are currently waiting a "few" weeks for that to happen. No dates have been given nor will they I suspect but let us again tabulate for potential customers buying a Monarch today.
2 to 3 weeks in their own admission to complete that task of tapeout.
10 weeks at the foundry for the chips.
2 weeks Bumping, Slicing & BGA packaging
3 weeks to "ramp" up to full shipping. (Prototype Testing?)
That is a minimum of 17 weeks even by their estimation from today and given there is no room for testing the chip package on the Monarch you can imagine what it going to happen again. 19 weeks is more likely and given BFL's track record you could expect 7 months are more for delivery since they really haven't improved at all in terms of shipping their products more efficiently in fact the numbers indicate as Joeventura has posted they are slower now than they have been in the past increasing delays to 8 months of a backlog.
They admit to a minimum of 3 MONTHS OR MORE in the fine print. If you do the calculations for a 300 GH/s at 2800$ plus shipping in March or April of 2014 and possibly a lot later more likely May 2014 if you order today you are going to not make anything in fact you will probably receive a unit that will only lose money in USD terms do to electricity costs. This product is DOA. Do not BUY IT.
What other parts do these Monarchs need?
PSU
Cabling
Controller / Mobo.
Are we adding that into the $2800 people? I hope you are.
For example, in order to deploy 18 TeraHash into a single data center cabinet, you would need 30 Monarch cards. Each 3 fit nicely into a standard 4U rackmount enclosure with a basic motherboard & ATX power supply unit. 10 of these will fill an entire cabinet with no wasted space. It will also consume exactly the standard power and cooling capacity provided for a cabinet at most data centers.
4U Enclosure ($$$$)
Motherboard ($$$$)
Multiple ATX Power Supplies ($$$$)
Heatsinks ($$$$)
Waterblocks ($$$$)