I got in to bitcoin mining about a year ago by purchasing a used Cointerra TerraMiner IV. The price of bitcoin was higher than the electricity cost to run the machine. I don't know a lot about the internals of the machine, but I know it's 4 GoldStrike I 28nm ASIC boards (2 per board) controlled by an embedded linux beaglebone board. With the current news about the Bitcoin/XT split, I'm wondering if it's possible to upgrade the mining software to support XT.
I'm not too familiar with ASIC boards—does "application-specific" exclude Bitcoin XT in this case?
My background: Computer Science/Software Engineering/Internet Security Research