CoinBau promotional image from: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=719143.0
Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a profile of Dresden-based mining hardware startup CoinBau AG and their plan to bring German engineering to the ASIC market.
The company claims to have created a custom 28nm chip design that can achieve 0.19 joules per gigahash, an unheard of efficiency in an already cutting-edge industry. By comparison, today’s best-performing real-world ASICs operate at around 0.35 joules/GH.
The company is attempting to raise between $10 and $15 million to mass-produce the new chip, dubbed Wolfblood Extreme Efficiency, although it has admitted that testing of the design has been limited to simulations.
The ever-skeptical mining community has been questioning CoinBau’s claims since the company announced plans to fund chip development by selling shares of an eventual mining operation once the ASICs went into production.
With no publicly testable version of their first-generation chip, and no plans to release the second-generation chip into the wild until funding is complete and their hashing center operational, CoinBau is asking investors to take quite a leap of faith.
Should CoinBau’s chips prove up to the task and find funding, the company estimates packing around 4.8 TH/s into a 19” case, and with a targeted energy consumption of 0.27 W/GH/s per case.
While impressive in theory, this performance isn’t terribly far removed from several products already announced for Q4 of 2014, meaning that it might be standard performance by the time CoinBau could reasonably expect to test and release a product in mid-2015.