Jimmothy.
Good links for sure...
However may i refer you here.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/havelock-alcheminer-scrypt-asic-565415This is well after the FPGA prototype had been finished. Which means that alcheminer white labeled the MAT gear. This is a VERY VERY common practice in tech period.
http://www.topbitcoinmininghardware.com/war-machine-gaw-miners/We all know that is a zues miner right?
Another thing to keep in mind. Other companies do tape outs...
Let me give you an example...
Remember this thing?
http://bitmine.ch/coincraft-28nm-asic/This was done by a company called Innosilicon. I have visited Innosilicon in china personally. And the owners are now good friends of mine. However, Innosilicon also made their own chip... called the A1. In fact it is the same chip. Also, they made something called a2. Which is a beast mode scrypt miner. But regardless who cares.
So my question to you is how does this matter in anyway? Regardless on who made the chipset. I am looking at this purely from an objective standpoint. Does it matter who is using whose stuff? I mean if innosilicon would give me free chips and let me laser over it and put my face on it i would. Because let's be honest... a chip with my face on it would be BITCHIN!... lol
Sorry "bud" but the more you type, the more you really come across as not having a clue. All you are doing is spouting off bits and pieces of non-technical hearsay you have picked up listening to others.
If you are so buddy buddy with Innosilicon you would know that they were contracted to make the A1 for Bitmine and had a non-compete agreement for a specific amount of time. Unfortunately Bitmine were so monumentally incompetent and building a working miner around the chip (I mean months!) that the clock ran out on the non-compete agreement and Innosilicon were free to sell their own and to OEMs. Go check the Bitmine thread if you want to see a bunch of unhappy customers.
It matters because MAT set themselves up to be making their own chips, priced their products accordingly, set an unrealistic, aggressive schedule knowing full well they wouldn't be able to keep it, then tried to resell someone elses products as their own.
MAT is no better than AMT in my books. Just a reseller of other peoples tech who took loads of overpriced pre-orders and didn't deliver citing production issues for a non-existent production line. Horrendous communications with customers, shill accounts, lies and deception.
What he should have done is just been straight from the start, told people he was just going to screenprint his logo on other peoples hardware, but its hard to run the sort of scam that he has run and get the pre-order cash in his pocket that he has without pretending to be a chip manufacturer and developer rather than just a box shifter of OEM systems.
Thats how its played out in these threads, and that's why people are rightly pissed off. Too many customers have been ripped off by these "ASIC" sellers. Most of us understand the difficulties in starting your own business and sympathise with an actual manufacturer having tape-out issues or pcb redesigns, but even then people have their limits, hence the lawsuits and federal investigations around Bitmine, BFL, Hashfast, KnC etc. So when someone comes along pretending to be of that level of production but really isn't then it makes it even worse.