[hershel]

This chip will probably cost $8000 or more. equivalent asic's will cost much less.And yes,the problem with ASIC is the higher development cost(NRE), but companies like baysand and especially easic offer low NRE chips with performance/price close(r) to ASIC.

The nice thing about those companies, is that this low NRE and possibility to do low volumes , might open ASIC's to startups and niche applications.

One such example is VMC that builds bitcoin mining chipsets using easic.