I'd be interested to see what Avalon comes up with as far as new chips. If the efficiency and price don't suck, we'll have to look pretty seriously into working with them. SFARDS really seem proactive (so far) on assisting independent development, which is great, except high-current BGA and dual-algo are both things I wish to avoid. More so the package, really.
Yeah, small miners below several hundred GH/s would be useful mostly as learning tools to get noobs in and understanding what the whole system is about, and how much fun it is to tinker with stuff. Not a lot of intrinsic profitability, but nonintrinsics abound when you consider how much knowledge can be gleaned from a sub-$100 hardware purchase when the hardware is designed to be flexible.
Think of something like the Raspi of miners.
People can utilize it for any number of educational or developmental purposes.
I imagine a small, quiet, low powered miner that could operate on DC with a battery pack and solar array. Hobby powered miners.
Except 12U 16KW machines.
What I'm interested to see is why exactly those machines don't scale down, or are modular. What is the functional unit that is 16KW and 12U exactly? What becomes more expensive when you try and make it 8KW and 6U? Sure would be easier to move. Even Bitfury went with ~4U and 2-3KW in the previous gen.
this is a good question.
A 30 amp 240 volt circuit = 7200 watts de-rate to 5760 watts . Why not have the units at this size 5500 watts and 16th 6u high.
I could do this and I know many home miners can step up to this.
But as sidehack said this would knock a lot of miners out.
F2pool has around 9000 miners actively mining.
Btc guild has more then 4000 miners actively mining.
Bit minter has many active miners. over 1000.
Lots of them are under 1th why shut them out?
I think we need thousands of little miners. Far more important to the system then 4 or 5 giants.
Pools are on the decline. I doubt that many will survive longer term. They might hang around for 12 months tops my guess if they are populated with die hard miners with only a few TH/s at home. The death of small scaled mining has started and the weaker pools are the next to fall.