If you thought that recently announced Baikal Giant-N Cryptonight ASIC miner is powerful and is going to kill the Cryptonight GPU mining you might want to reconsider. Bitmain has just announced their response in the form of the Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC miner and it is much more powerful than what Baikal Miner is offering. The Bitmain Antminer X3 promises 220 KH/s hashrate for Cryptonight at 550 Watts of power usage, so 11 times more powerful than the Giant-N at roughly 2 times higher price and shipping the second part of May. By the time these devices start shipping Monero (XMR) will most likely not be mineable anymore with Cryptonight ASIC miners along with some other coins that have announced plans to fork in order to remain ASIC resistant, so all the extra hashpower will need to go somewhere else.
At a price of $11999 USD per device and limited to just 1 unit per order Bitmain is accepting only BCH and USD payments for the miners. The second batch of Antminer X3 is planned to start shipping a month later, so in the second part of June with a significantly lower price of $7599 USD, though who knows how many Cryptonight coins might fork to ASIC resistant implementation by then. Just to be on the safe side be careful with the Cryptonight ASICs from Baikal and form Bitmain in order not to end up with a piece of useless hardware that can hardly mine anything profitable, even with its very high performance.
