5b) Also how would you feel after spending X thousand dollars on your miner to discover that when you receive it it only has 100-Y% of the cores operating, while some other guy (also payed X K$) on the forum received his miner which has 100% of the cores operating? This after you have spent numerous of hours trying to restart your miner, upgrading software, power cycle, swapped pools, replaced the PSU you bought because initially because you thought it could not supply enough power to the miner, etc. Of course the hash rate is within the late announced hash rate given by the vendor, so you can't ship it back for a replacement.
If KnC has at least half of their brains working they will use the no-grade-A chips to run in the hosted environment that they offer. That way somebody who ordered say 400GH/s can have his order fullfilled with two physical boxes of say 200GH/s. No big deal at all to anyone.
KnC is skipping a testing methodology used by the vast majority of the ASIC industry: chip level testing to make sure they detect faults at the chip tester and not in the assembled product, where they might not even know if the cause is a defective ASIC. Rather than stopping or sorting the bad chips at the fab, they pass them on to their customers. Again, which hopefully will receive miners above the later announced rate.
As I've mentioned earlier I would have expected the hash rate to be given by the architecture and static timing analysis (assuming they have designed the rest of the miner so the operating conditions of the ASIC timing model is not violated). I was not aware that KnC was skipping this common testing methodology, but it might explain why they are so uncertain about the actual final performance of their miners: It will depend heavily on the yield of ASIC's as they will be mounting defective ASIC's into the miners as they don't know in advance which chips are defective or not.
In the old, analog, days I would call you a "broken record": there's no music, no feel and no rhythm in your repeating "testing methodology", "timing analysis", etc. I don't know the correct analogy for the modern, all digital, days.
But anyway, lets do a quick survey of the Bitcoin mining ASIC industry. Thus far we had 5 chips that reached the physical implementation. 4 of them (ASICminer,Avalon,BFL,bitfury) all foregone the ususal JTAG and other testing frameworks, and all of them are more or less happily hashing. 1 vendor (helveticoin) had a mining SoC prototype hashing in October of last year. I presume they implemented JTAG and the other testing goodies, because they had an ARM CPU on the chip. Yet they failed to field a marketable mining system so far despite being ahead of the several other vendors.
Thus far the no-JTAG-team bats 1.000 whereas the JTAG-team bats 0.000 . Obviously the match has not yet ended and the ball is still in play.
BTW: Just keep your rude personal attacks and wrong assumptions of what I do and have or have not done coming. I simply ignore them, but they seem to be good for your inflated ego.
I actually now think that you are an art project: somebody is working on a screenplay for
Office Space 2: Initrode does ASICs and wanted to test some jokes.
We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. But if you aren't going to start putting the proper cover sheets on your
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPS_reports, then we will have to go ahead and take away your red stapler.
. 
). That's the trouble with proprietary systems, no knowledge of exactly what is going on inside the black box (cue conspiracy theorists