Intel, an American chip manufacturer, has announced plans to compete with ASIC devices with its own bitcoin mining chips. The company has decided to fully embrace blockchain technology and enter the bitcoin mining space with brand new chips that will most likely be available by the end of the year.
Intel announced in an official blog post that it has created a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators. The company stated that it is aware that “some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power” and is thus concentrating its efforts on developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.
The new product’s first customers include Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square), and GRID infrastructure.
The company’s new architecture is built on a tiny piece of silicon and will have little effect on the supply of other Intel processors.
Intel has formed a Custom Compute Group for the upcoming blockchain hardware, which will be managed by Raja Koduri’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Business Unit.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the new Bitcoin-mining hardware may be referred to as Bonanza Mine Chips and is expected to be presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
However, Intel has already begun work on the BMZ2, the second generation of Bonanza Mine chips.
The chips have a specialized architecture that was developed specifically for the acceleration of SHA-256 processing for Bitcoin mining at ultra-low voltage.
The energy-efficient chips, according to Intel, will have “over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256-based mining.”
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