I guess the question I have is... what is the chance of getting a hole-in-one with their first stab at the chip. It seems that bitfury missed his target by about 50% in performance, but it is still a useful chip and they are going with it.
They said they would stuff as many chips in the box as they needed. From the cad files they posted the box is pretty large and could probably fit more chips.
The question is... can KnC/OrSoC get it all right the first time around.
The fact that a company with no experience in semiconductor design had problems doesn't mean a company with years of experience building semiconductors for paying customers, presumably on time, is going to have the same problems.
Also all these parties have to communicate and work together:
KnC <-> ORSoC <-> unknown FPGA-ASIC conversion house <-> unknown ASIC vendor
There are so many things which can go wrong when you make an ASIC. Getting it right the first time is hard.
ORSoC
is an ASIC design place, and their upstream provider is a company called eASIC, which I think works with TSMC.
I don’t think it is possible to write a calculator that would predict at which difficulty people will start shutting down their ASICS and the difficulty will stop growing. IMO the calculator by The Genesis Block is a “pessimistic” variant which was really necessary because all calculators that accounted for difficulty increase lacked the delayed mining start parameter. Still, I think in a year it gives quite accurate prediction because a long time, much longer than a year has to pass before the hashrate race is over.
The problem with all the calculators is that they assume an exponential growth in mining forever. That would require ether an exponential growth month by month in ASIC providers forever, or an exponential growth in the amount of product they ship out the door. Is BFL going to shipping out 200x chips each month in a year, and 40,000x a year from now? Is Avalon going to be shipping millions of chips, then billions?
Come on.
Other then moore's law (which is much, much slower then bitcoin network growth so far) you're much more likely to see a linear growth in network hashrate over the long term once things re-stabilize after the current tsunami of ASICs goes out the door.