There’s also evidence to suggest that Intel is already working on its second-generation mining chip.
Intel has been making several moves into the crypto space of late.
At this year’s International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel shared tech details for its first-generation “Bonanza Mine” (BMZ1) blockchain accelerator chip, which it recently started taking orders for.
The computing giant also unveiled a new 3,600-watt mining rig comprising 300 BMZ1 chips.
The first thing to note about the BMZ1 chip is that it’s an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), meaning it’s designed to carry out specific tasks – in this case, mining Bitcoin – with a performance that’s purportedly a thousand times better at mining, per watt of energy, than a GPU.
In sum, the BMZ1 is expected to save a ton of energy. And stacking 300 of them into a 3,600-watt mining rig produces a machine with a system hash rate of 40 terahashes per second (TH/s).
That’s not quite as powerful as the 198 TH/s claimed by Bitmain’s 5,445-watt liquid-cooled miner, out this summer, but Intel also said that its miner’s underlying BMZ1 chips are the cleanest and most powerful on the market.