Intel’s crypto mining chip coming by 2022
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Intel’s new high-efficiency chip for cryptocurrency mining will arrive in late 2022.
That was confirmed by Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja M. Koduri, in a post on the company’s official website.
Koduri says that the exponential increases in computing performance enabled by Moore’s Law democratize access to huge processing power pools capable of doing “amazing things.”
Among these, he explicitly cites blockchain as a technology that can allow everyone to own much of the digital content and services they create. In this, the availability of many more computing resources will play a crucial role for everyone.
Intel wants to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies and, in this regard, has developed a roadmap for its “energy-efficient accelerators.” It will also work to promote an open and secure blockchain ecosystem, helping to advance it responsibly and sustainably.
Koduri cites “some blockchains” (read Bitcoin) that require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates into an immense amount of energy. To this, he responds that due to demand from some of their customers who are asking for scalable and sustainable solutions, they plan to release their blockchain accelerator by the end of the year.
That’s obviously an energy-efficient chip for Bitcoin mining, and the customers mentioned above include Argo Blockchain (publicly traded), BLOCK (Jack Dorsey‘s company), and GRIID Infrastructure. It also reports that the new chip has an architecture implemented on a tiny piece of silicon to have minimal impacts on the delivery of current products.
The goal is to achieve over a thousand times more performance per watt than traditional GPUs for SHA-256-based mining.
Bitcoin mining with wood
Meanwhile, there continue to be several initiatives to optimize Bitcoin mining with existing instrumentation.
One of them was reported a few days ago by the Guardian, and it concerns an initiative by Kryptovault, which is a Norwegian company that mines Bitcoin.
Kryptovault operates within a Norwegian mine where wood is also dried. In a nutshell, Norway’s main mining farm, on the outskirts of a small town 40 miles west of Oslo, Hønefoss, uses waste heat from mining to dry the wood.
In fact, the wood is heated with some of the heat emitted by thousands of ASICs working inside a warehouse. Hot air is pumped into curved corrugated pipes that exit the warehouse. In a few days, the logs dry, after which a local lumberjack picks them up and sells them.
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