Intel is on the brink of penetrating the bitcoin mining ASIC-making market to compete with the likes of Bitmain and Canaan
Intel is preparing to enter the Bitcoin mining market, beginning with the unveiling of a new Bitcoin mining “Bonanza Mine” chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISCC) in February.
Manufacturing giant in the semiconductor industry At the International Solid-State Circuits (ISSC) conference, Intel will unveil the “Bonanza Mine,” an energy-efficient Bitcoin ASIC. There are little details regarding the $223 billion company’s forthcoming Bitcoin mining venture. It’s unclear if Intel will show a finished product or just a prototype processor.
Because they have to rely on third-party foundries to build the chips, the leading bitcoin ASIC manufacturers, such as Bitmain, have extensive lead times and demand excessively high prices for their chips. Due to the intermittent nature of cryptomining and the uncertainty of demand, foundries like as TSMC do not grant these businesses privileged status in their fabs; instead, the fabs emphasize longer-term reliable business from larger chip makers. All of this suggests that Intel, backed by its massive production capacity, might make a significant and profitable foray into this high-margin industry, giving it an advantage over competitors. It remains to be seen whether or not this will occur.
Raja Koduri, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) group, said in an interview in December that the company was working on a dedicated chip for cryptocurrency mining, despite the fact that the company’s GPU cards weren’t designed for that use case.
“GPUs will do graphics, gaming, and all those wonderful things,” Koduri said. “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.”
