Hi Giorgio!
When is your expected timeline for your selfmade ASIC?
You dont have to be very specific. I just want to know: 2013? 2014? December? January?
Hey there!
1st week of december 2013 but it's not official yet, I commented because I just had a full day of meeting and discussions with our ASIC partner exactly on this subject and we came out clearly with the conclusion that big supercharged single chip miners end up being MORE (yes, more) expensive in total BOM than a rig of smaller, agile mining ASICs.
It is a good thing they are still way above cost, cause the worth of such machines will drop like a stone.
Well Avalon charges $9 per chip (AFAIK someone correct me if I am wrong) and that is obviously inflated 1000% or more over silicon cost and that cost will sink like a stone. So you could remove $2400 from the system by assumming the price of chips in bulk drops from $9 to $1 to remain competitive. However my point was that even doing that looking at an Avalon, the balance of the system cost (PCB, heatsinks, assembly, DC to DC power supply, power distribution board, controller board, even mundane things like fans, power supply, and cases) isn't being marked up 1000%. Excluding the cost of the chips you couldn't drop the cost on the rest of the system 90%. So while the value (and price) of older chips will indeed fall like a stone the BOM (balance of materials) cost will subdue the price drops.
On a related topic this is why I believe those that think $1/GH complete miners are reasonable are just silly. Still in full disclosure I own miners, shares, and pre-orders with multiple companies but not Avalon so I may just be biased.
Yay let's not talk about Avalon's design anymore please, it was the world's first ASIC miner and was conceived with the idea of a central unit talking simultaneously to all the 24/32 hashing units, future miners based on small chips (like Bitfury) feature a ridiculously low cost serial bus that daisy chains them all together with no additional external components (except for some decoupling capacitors).
