ArtForz has developed sha256 ASICs and let them (100 pieces) manufacturing for about $500/engine. This ASICs beats 5970 on hash/W by a factor of 6 but loses to 5970 on hash/$ by about a factor of 3, he said. These ASICs are not exactly a real standard cell ASIC but "metal-layer defined ASIC, basically FPGA without the FP part" (source: #bitcoin-dev).
What kind of ASIC is it? Is this a custom PCI card? Would higher production volumes improve the price point? I'm interested in this, as a purpose made PCI card would be as big a boon as buying an expensive GPU.
ArtForz expect the arrive in february:
https://stuff.caurea.org/irssi/freenode/%23bitcoin-dev/2010/12/%23bitcoin-dev-2010-12-20.log : 18:36
Maybe the first step to develop a ASIC is this vhdl code. I don't believe that ArtForz will give us his code. If we put money together, maybe we could have enough money to let manufacturing a real ASIC.
