AMD buys components for 100s of millions of boards.
You are off by orders of magnitude. AMD sells less than 1M high end (game grade) videocards per quarter. And thats AMD, consider the bazillion OEM's that sell cards that are price competitive, yet are much lower volume, probably in same ballpark if not below some bitcoin asic manufacturers 6 months from here. Sure, AMD and nVidia will have a volume pricing advantage, but its not going to matter for this comparison, and its not going to be anywhere near a factor 2x.
Packaging costs for the kind of silicon being used here often higher than the silicon.
Packaging is priced per ball typically. The bitcoin asics arent that high pin count, there is no way it would cost more than $10 per chip. More likely $2-5 in volume. FWIW, I calculated using $10 in packaging cost, though I think $2 is probably closer once they achieve volume's of 100K's.
As for MCM's. If it were more expensive to package 4 dies in a chip than doing 4 chips, why would they? You might argue for watercooling that the cooling is significantly cheaper, but even KnC is using MCM's with off the shelve air cooling.
And yield can suck at both the silicon level and the packaging level
Its not going to suck for everyone all the time, which is what matters. And yield shouldnt be a problem, considering these chips have dozens of "cores" that can be disabled if defective. They should achieve very near 100% yield if you allow a few bad cores per chip. Anyway, I assumed 90% yields, which is probably low for these chips.
That just gets you to a bare board. To get to a system level you still need cooling (high performance = high cost), a case, and power supply.
Monarch doesnt have a PSU. SHould miners include that in their ROI calculation? Yeah. WIll they? Doubtful. Many still have piles of PSU's. And even if you dont, a PSU doesnt become worthless after one year or when mining is no longer profitable. As for case, look at KnC. Just 2 sheets of plied aluminum. Cant cost more than $10 in volume, if that. You can buy full ATX cases with fans for that much.
BTW, chip cooling is included in that BOM. In fact, its about the most expensive part of the videocard.
All that puts you in the range of $400 / Th/s cost at best.
I dont think so.
Then you need to account for overhead. Each of the professional companies have staffing on the order of 10 people, many of whom command high salaries. Offices, health care, travel and marketing all have to be shared over the units sold. Let's assume your typical company moves 50 Ph/s in 2014, and has $2.5M in operating expenses. (that would be tremendous sales, and low costs). That would add another $50 / Th/s to the system cost.
Yes there has to be a profit margin to pay the overhead. Im calculating BOM. In most businesses a 10% margin is what it takes to operate. Put it at 20% if you want. But keep in mind, once difficulty has gone up that much that market prices approach marginal cost, the alternative for those asic vendors is shutting their doors.
Prices will come down, but not as much as you think.
Lets check back in 24 months.
