I'm not invested in knc but the pic gave me a chuckle..."box and a bunch of fans"
I'm not implying anything else

5V HAHAHAHAHA enjoy that.

Yeah ultimately it is 120VAC/240VAC in and ~1VDC out. The individual steps (or number of steps) doesn't really matter.  What matters is the overall efficiency from the wall to the chip.  ATX PSU are very efficient at what they do.  It is unlikely any design (from wall to chip) will be more efficient than using a 12V rail on ATX PSU.  I had even looked into dedicated 12V PSU (i.e ones used for industrial equipment not PCs) and while they are sometimes cheaper they aren't as efficient (efficiency tends to be high 80%).

Making the user try to find a PSU capable of up to 200 amps on 5V (Jupiter pulls 1000W) is going to immediately kill of the most accessible, best priced, and high efficiency options ... ATX (computer) PSU.

Like you said, lets hope it is a typo (it really uses 12V not 5V at board level) and not a horribly stupid design choice.

Not to mention the fire risk (thinking of the guy who melted his Avalon PDU). Even 12 volts is 80 amps at 1000W. Make sure you plug all of those connectors in before firing it up (I wonder if there may be a consumer equipment safety problem here. I would hate for it to fail to get a CE/UL sticker).

KnCminer terms and conditions specify that they are selling a product for business, not end users. So that could justify why there is necessary a PSU not so "consumer friendly".

I will Google more to see if I can discover a 5V 100A PSU without connectors.

If you look back at previous newsletters it shows a picture of the quad chip with 0.9V DC/DC power converters. Almost certainly 12V input (its not a problem for a single stage buck converter). They also mention hosting, with explicit ATX power supplies. so the 5V is almost certainly a typo.

I would think it would have to be a typo. I've reached out to KnC to confirm, as this would be a major design flaw even if they were targeting the "business" market.

if they are targeting business market, I'm fine with it, but in this case PSU outside miner doesn't make any sense.

Nice to see a little progress, but like everyone else I am not happy to see it will use 5v. I have a lot of ATX PSUs laying around, it would be nice to be able to use them.

I do not think it was a typo... its kind of hard to accidentally type 5 instead of 12..

Would something like this require much redesigning to switch it over to 12v... as in, if everyone requests they use 12v, can they make the switch easily? I know nothing about PCB design.