I may have missed it in the business plan, but what is your long term plan for this project? After the initial 100TH deployment, are you planning on creating another batch using the same technology?
We will see. This depends on the 28nm chip [price and foreseen number of chips on market].
starting a new project on new tech?
Yes, probably already in May we will try 28nm MPW (either also ST or another foundry).
Would you consider sourcing chips from the 28nm project?
Sure, but we have to find out the pricing. The authors has a quite strange approach to the 28nm chip production. We would go for full mask if we were them.
BTW, did you submit the final design to the foundry today?
No, mainly because the parameters of the 28nm chip were released few day ago. We are trying to find places were we can still optimize the chip. My guess is we need 2 more days.
Based on our estimations the 28nm chip should be 4 times more power efficient and 10 times cheaper, so competition is futile :-) but we still want to get as high as possible with the 55nm design to have a good start for 28nm.
My guess is that the 28nm authors are either from ST directly or from CMP (close partner). It will be very difficult to compete with such an experienced team :-(
I would not delay
too much over speculation that the 28nm project is real (and will deliver on time). For example, if you had plans of building ASICS in the summer, but scraped those plans due to BFL announcing delivery in Oct/Nov, then you'd have shot yourself in the foot (announcing early had the benefit of dissuading potential competitors from entering the market).
You only have control over what you can deliver and if you think you can deliver by Jun/Jul, then you should still have plenty of time to recoup costs (and profit handsomely) even if 28nm hits the market at the same time. The current hash rate and BTC price are much better than your original business plan had anticipated, so time-to-market is even more important now than it was before.
tl;dr - Don't worry about
beating the 28nm project. If you meet your timelines, you
are/will be competitive with them in the short term...the most important (profitable) timeframe.
This is somewhat analogous to ASICMiner vs BFL. ASICMiner started later with weaker technology, but are now making a killing because they met their timelines.