They sure did. We don’t know how powerful it will actually be. 10k hash supposedly. It will be a powerful miner for the cost. Not all equihash coins will counter the attack, but btcz devs are already working on it. You can follow in chat as it is coming up quite often since the z9 announcement.
Not sure how bitmain does this. Should of known once the e3 was announced 120M at 300w power draw, equihash was next. 10k sol’s for a 1100?w power draw. Both are killer. Will be a paper weight for some coins eventually, but not all ethash and equihash coins will change.
The ASICS are coming to GPU land.
Luckily the 1st batch will be small. So the devs have time.