I would strongly urge those who are looking into investing in this to really do your diligence into those behind the operation and their track record...most of the information is public and if you do a little bit of digging; I think it will surely make the decision a clear no-brainer for many of you. But besides that if you look at what they are offering:
~ 25 Mh/s for ~ $9000 USD and most likely closer to $10,000 once you consider shipping & customs taxes, you are looking at a rig efficiency of $2.5 kH / $USD. Also the cost of locking your money up for at least 3 months (dream scenario) if not longer, If you remember back to what happened with the first batches of SHA Asics, there will most likely be a relatively long development cycle, and a lot of up and downs before they iron out all the bugs and we get a final tape-out. My optimistic estimate would be no earlier than late Q3 2013.
But more than that, it's going to take a fair bit of capital as well to do all of this development work; and to date, no major name has stepped up to the plate to provide that yet, so money is at major risk in terms of halted or partial development and running out of funds, especially as they will be relying on the pre-order infusion to get things going.
For reference; I had created a 20+ Mh farm for $14k - and in the next buildout we are going to be able to drastically reduce costs to the level of $22 Mh / $12k, and continue to go down with increased volume. So you are looking at about a level of 1.8 kH / $USD. What I'm suggesting is that a 9 month wait for an additional 39% of cost efficiency probably only makes sense if they were able to ship out in the next few months or if you were looking to have an extremely scalable solution and were going very large - something that can be mitigated through creative management and tools of traditional rigs. And what's more in the case of a altcoin meltdown or a change in the cryptography to be resistant to the Scrypt Asic, you'd very much be left with a hunk of dead weight. However, GPUs have liquidation value that is probably at worst ~70% of your original investment in the hardware.
So:
Pros for ASIC: Much easier to manage / Much better energy efficiency / Scalable / Cost efficiency
Cons for ASIC: No risk mitigation / Long lead-times for what is currently vaporware / ASIC by definition not agile
Anyways just some food for thought; so perhaps if we pooled our resources along the lines of creating a traditional GPU farm it would be a more effective use of our money - in fact the wheels are already spinning on this front; give me a shout if this thinking is sound to you and you'd like to become involved in some way or if you think that there are some massive gaps in logic, would appreciate that even more.
All the best and Happy Holidays
~ 25 Mh/s for ~ $9000 USD and most likely closer to $10,000 once you consider shipping & customs taxes, you are looking at a rig efficiency of $2.5 kH / $USD. Also the cost of locking your money up for at least 3 months (dream scenario) if not longer, If you remember back to what happened with the first batches of SHA Asics, there will most likely be a relatively long development cycle, and a lot of up and downs before they iron out all the bugs and we get a final tape-out. My optimistic estimate would be no earlier than late Q3 2013.
But more than that, it's going to take a fair bit of capital as well to do all of this development work; and to date, no major name has stepped up to the plate to provide that yet, so money is at major risk in terms of halted or partial development and running out of funds, especially as they will be relying on the pre-order infusion to get things going.
For reference; I had created a 20+ Mh farm for $14k - and in the next buildout we are going to be able to drastically reduce costs to the level of $22 Mh / $12k, and continue to go down with increased volume. So you are looking at about a level of 1.8 kH / $USD. What I'm suggesting is that a 9 month wait for an additional 39% of cost efficiency probably only makes sense if they were able to ship out in the next few months or if you were looking to have an extremely scalable solution and were going very large - something that can be mitigated through creative management and tools of traditional rigs. And what's more in the case of a altcoin meltdown or a change in the cryptography to be resistant to the Scrypt Asic, you'd very much be left with a hunk of dead weight. However, GPUs have liquidation value that is probably at worst ~70% of your original investment in the hardware.
So:
Pros for ASIC: Much easier to manage / Much better energy efficiency / Scalable / Cost efficiency
Cons for ASIC: No risk mitigation / Long lead-times for what is currently vaporware / ASIC by definition not agile
Anyways just some food for thought; so perhaps if we pooled our resources along the lines of creating a traditional GPU farm it would be a more effective use of our money - in fact the wheels are already spinning on this front; give me a shout if this thinking is sound to you and you'd like to become involved in some way or if you think that there are some massive gaps in logic, would appreciate that even more.
All the best and Happy Holidays
Interesting point but how can you reduce your costs to 22 mh / 12k?
Even 20+Mh for 14k is pretty impressive. I guess it must be those connections to suppliers 
