Intel, one of the biggest chip makers in the world, will reveal a new crypto-mining chip called Bonanza Mine this February 2022. The ‘Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC’ will be unveiled at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
Bonanza Mine claims to finish calculations as effectively as other ASICs while removing the need for redundant computations. This way, the overall power consumption will be reduced by approximately 15%.
However, it is still unclear whether Intel will release the Bonanza Mine for sale or if it will be for industrial or research purposes only. In addition, it is also not confirmed whether the presentation will serve as a product launch, demonstration or simply sharing of a project idea.
If Intel decides to introduce Bonanza Mine on the market, it will compete with corporations like Bitmain which proposed Ether ASIC and Nvidia that was recently struck by a number of cases of declining chip sales.
Last December 2021, Raja Koduri, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) appeared on streamer Dr Lupo’s YouTube channel to promote the launch of the company’s first gaming GPUs. He stated that Intel had also been working on a chip dedicated to crypto mining since Intel’s GPU cards were not yet designed for that use.
‘GPUs will do graphics, gaming, and all those wonderful things. But being able to do much more efficient blockchain validation at a much lower cost, much lower power, is a pretty solvable problem. And you know, we are working on that, and at some point in time, hopefully not too far into the future, we will share some interesting hardware for that.’ Koduri said.
It is known that the processors used for crypto mining are subject to shortages and diminishing gross sales. Regardless of this decline, the representatives from Intel are confident with their new chip saying that the company has done design work around SHA 256 optimised ASICS for several years already.
In 2018, Intel has submitted a patent that outlines the same ideas for high-performance Bitcoin mining. This patent is presumed to be included in the process of the product Intel will show off at the ISSCC. The ISSCC conference is a yearly gathering where the best and brightest minds in the computer chip industry present their advanced circuits and chips to a network of leading experts.
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