Comment Re:Um? (Score 4, Informative) 320
Actually one of the more serious projects(ASICMINER) DO plan to use the first batches of chips to compensate the IPO investors by using them for mining and later to possibly help fund more R&D and production runs. Additional and future income will be based on sales of the hardware
And since this is
Built on 130nm node process (approximately comparable to the Pentium III generation)
It'll use a 15 x 15mm BGA package.
It's expected to run at around 200-300Mhz
It'll be a couple orders of magnitude more power efficient than GPUs and serveral times more than current FPGAs at hashing the SHA256 algorithm.
More info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.980
and older (but more geek bait): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0
Project is only about 2/3rds of the way through the foundry process, so atleast a month left till these chips could be active on the BTC network.