There is NO WAY that 20 nm will come out in any quantities before mid/late 2014 (and that would be very impressive) and time-to-market is still more important then anything.
EXACTLY!!! This is what all of the panic sellers are missing. Labcoin, btcgarden, ActiveMining, etc. are all going to have chips out for months if not years before any of these supposed 20nm chips start pumping out. Even if/when 20nm chips are out, they won't be able to compete on cost! According to NVIDIA the 20nm chips are so expensive and low yield that the benefit of miniaturization hits a brick wall quickly.
As I posted in the ActM thread:
Even AMD and NVIDIA are not producing 20nm chips yet and they are huge semiconductor companies with billions of dollars that usually keep TSMC and other companies busy.
NVIDIA gave a presentation in late 2011 explaining the problems of moving to 20nm including high costs for little performance gain.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless
20nm is going to cost significantly more than 28nm for at least a couple years based on NVIDIA's projections here, and the production lines will be busy fulfilling orders for these semiconductor giants, not a tiny company like Avalon regardless of whether or not they receive this alleged $200 M investment. Avalon's 20nm chips would be
at least one year away if not more; they would be absurdly expensive and they would not be able to compete on price with the 3 contenders for the 28nm market who will have much lower NRE and R&D costs as well as getting to market faster.
From the article: "What this slide states — we can’t even call it a suggestion — is that smaller processes no longer improve yields by leading to a greater number of chips per wafer. Instead, the complexities and difficulties of manufacturing at the new process create a cost structure that provides precious little incentive to manufacture at the new process. "
