Everyone, just stop with the die size comparisons. They're completely useless for differentiating profitability. They'd be useful for expressing differences in package size or interface speeds, but they do not belong in the conversation for profitability.
Do you mean die size or feature size? 28nm and 130nm are feature sizes, how big the transistors are. Die sizes are how big the chips themselves are, and thus
how much they cost to manufacture.
Smaller feature size means you can cram more transistors per mm
2, which means you can get the same hash power with smaller, cheaper dies.
So in other words, the shipping company with the electric trucks and solar panels will have a much higher startup cost, but in the long run they will be able to
charge less in the long run once that cost is amortized because they won't have to pay for gas or electricity. They can continue to charge less until their competitors go out of business, if they feel like it.
But anyway, that doesn't really matter that much at this point, because there is so much profit available everyone can make money. For now. But labcoin is going to have to keep up with the technology curve in the long run.
You missed the point entirely - forest for the trees, I think, so let me try to explain it differently. Die size, feature size, color of the box, etc. are irrelevant to profitability.
Sum of costs taken from sum of income is profit. Costs are easily controllable by not going with bleeding edge technology. Income is not easily controllable, but is dependant on the market, and the market wants hashrate regardless of the type of technology. If you can make a device that hashes faster NOW cheaper or at the same price as a "better technology" device 2 months from now, you will gain market share and therefore more profit. The key here is that the hash rate
per chip is not as important as
the cost of manufacturing that same hash rate with the cheapest method possible. To simplify the example, if I can ship (pulling numbers out of my ass for simplicity) 10 chips at 10 Gigahashes/sec/watt at a cost of 10BTC, or I can ship 1 chip at 10 Gigahashes/sec/watt at a cost of 12BTC, I make more money shipping the 10 chips - because the market price would be the same, as people are buying the hash/power rate, not the chip count. This is ESPECIALLY true if I can ship them sooner rather than later. Remember, this is not an engineering race to find the
smallest single chip, this is a business race to find the most efficient devices for the power, which is what matters to the market - and 130nm versus 65/28/whatever nm is not the important variable. It is
a variable, yes - but it's a small piece of the big picture.
Additionally, it's considerably more important to have an efficient chip design than it is to have smaller transistors - just because a race car uses a carbon fiber frame doesn't mean jack if there's insufficient engineering in the motor. This is what the Labcoin folks are promising: speed to market, superior engineering in the layout, and a price point as good as *future* deliveries of what is billed by others as "better" technology simply based on the technology size. Success is not predicated on 28nm, it's all on whether or not the devices have the best rate of return for the end customer (be that self mining or selling hardware.) Whether they deliver is another matter entirely, but that's what they're putting it out as.
And no, of course they're not going to rest forever on what works best for the market today - they're going to chase after the most efficient manufacturing source as quickly as possible whenever the cost to manufacture supports that change.
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merv's anecdotal quip about the NASA pen versus the Soviet solution of using a pencil is spot on - I saw it while reviewing new posts after I started to reply. Probably should have used that example rather than the shipping truck one for brevity. And no, it's not exactly true from an historical standpoint, but look at the story there, which is absolutely relevant: sometimes it's not as useful to spend a lot of money developing a new solution when there's a cheaper alternative already available.
