Costs can be argued about what is good or bad. I have not been following other Avalon based designs in any depth so anything I say is based on limited knowledge. I think the Burnin boards are using a USB interface and that is one we wanted to get away from. It's not great for a big design as we found out with CM1. When you get to 256 COM ports you are stuffed in Windows and maybe Linux too. The CM3 design will have a controller running Linux and miner software so doesn't need a host as such with those issues. We do have a USB interface but that is for special cases or maintainance.
USB on the surface, however they use 16 Board CAN-Bus connection to circumvent using 10.000 COM ports
The Avalon Units themselves did the same, by the way. You adressed them via Ethernet and then just let them run at the pool of your choice.
I could put this in context that as far as I understand batch3 from Avalon are charging 75 BTC for 66GH/s in their batch3 which I believe is running late and no ETA. On todays conversion that is about £73/GH/s so is that so very different from our £80/GH/s? If it doesn't sell we will simply put it into our own mining operation.
At current price, yes. Avalon's original pricing was planned to allow 30 day break even at the point of sale. As a business, I think 60-90 days estimated break even are more cost conservative.
We are also not going to try and compete with manufacturers that have little or no standing cost base and might not be around in 3 months when you have a problem.
If you are trying to do that, I guess you are creating your own chips. That is going to work out, I think.
I might also speculate that BFL has problems because they charged too little for their miners and their 2.5X recent-ish price rise is an indicator of that. Avalon too have also raised prices through batch 1 to 3 presumably for similar reasons. We have been in business now for 24 years and I am look forward to celebrating 25 still in reasonable financial health and that means charging realistic prices as far as we are concerned.
Nah, its probably worse than that. They probably messed up a lot of things early on and manufactured and sold like crazy, built boards and cases before testing their prototypes. Backfired a lot, as we all saw