Intel has announced plans to fully embrace blockchain technology and enter the Bitcoin mining market with brand new chips that will be available later in 2022. The company is aware that “some blockchains require massive computing power”, so it is focusing its efforts on developing the most energy-efficient technologies.
So far, Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly Square) and GRID are Intel’s first customers for this new product.
As the company’s new architecture is implemented on a tiny piece of silicon, it will have minimal impact on the supply of other Intel processors. In order to design and build its new hardware for the blockchain, Intel has created a new group called the Custom Compute Group that will operate under the direction of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) division led by Raja Koduri.
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According to a recent post on Tom’s Hardware, much is already known about Intel’s new hardware, as the site found a mention of the Bonanza Mine chips in a presentation at this year’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) scheduled for February 20.
However, Intel has already moved on to the second-generation Bonanza Mine chip known as BMZ2.
This new chip features a specialized architecture designed specifically to accelerate SHA-256 processing for Bitcoin mining at ultra-low power consumption. In fact, Intel claims that these energy-efficient chips will have “over 1000 times better performance per watts compared to mainstream GPUs for SHA-256-based mining.”
It’s worth noting, however, that GPUs are rarely used for SHA-256 mining and Bitcoin mining is usually done on specialized ASIC processors designed to perform one type of workload.
However, ASIC devices such as the Antminer E9 from Bitmain are often quite expensive and difficult to obtain.
Related: 10 Best Crypto to Mine Without Special Hardware Equipment
We will likely learn more about Intel’s entry into the Bitcoin mining market once the new chips start shipping to customers later this year.