BFL - March 28th Update from Twitter feed - All together for readability.I had planned on updating everyone with a video of a board hashing here in KC tonight, but I haven't been able to get that together yet, so I'm probably going to have to push it off until tomorrow. We are targeting a start of shipment next week, but I'm not quite ready to commit to that at the moment giving our past estimates. It's imminent, though.
We may miss our power targets, that's been part of the hold up. we think there's a problem with the power consumption and we're trying to figure out where it's having an issue. However, in the interests of time, we are going to be shipping what we have and going back and fixing while we are shipping.
The power is still far less than any other unit, so it's not like it's somethign crazy or anything, but it's not 1w/GH and we're trying to locate the source of the power drain.
The rest of the 6 wafers, we have been holding off on the last 5 layers for the rest of the chips to be sure we don't need to make a tweak in the metal layer due to the power issue. I think we've pretty much settled that the power issue is NOT in the chip.
If the cooling becomes an issue, like I said we'd scale it back and ship multiple units.
Worst case is 195w, but the power systems aren't rated to handle that, so we'd back off the hashrate before we'd let it get that high.
We will ship the purchased hashrate regardless of what it ends up costing us.
Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b8621/bfl_update_maybe_a_video_tomorrow_shipping/ hat tips to milone & astrobleem on r/Bitcoin
See some interesting comments, like:
...which is a nice perk for those very early pre-orders. Plug in your own power supply and get two for the price of one if you don't mind monkeying around with it on your own.
... they're going to underclock the fully populated boards for the SC singles. So, if you were an early pre-order, you have basically two full units ready to go if you want to plug in a bigger power supply and hope you don't burn the boards out too fast.
Edit to add: Estimated next difficulty: 7248349 (+8.3%) in 7 days and 15.2 hours
Edit to add:
Butterfly Labs (BFL) Bitforce SC ASIC Test