American chip manufacturer, Intel has announced its plans to take on ASIC devices with its own bitcoin mining chips. The company has decided to fully takeover blockchain technology and enter the bitcoin mining space with brand new chips, likely to be available by the end of the year.
In an official blog post, Intel announced that it has developed a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators. The company commented that it is well-aware that “some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power” and is, therefore, focusing its efforts on developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.
Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square), and GRID infrastructure are amongst the first customers for the new product. The company’s new architecture is implemented on a tiny piece of silicon and will have a minimal impact on the supply of other Intel processors.
For the upcoming blockchain hardware, Intel has created a Custom Compute Group, expected to operate under Raja Koduri’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Business Unit.
A report from Tom’s Hardware states that the new Bitcoin-mining hardware may be listed as Bonanza Mine Chips and are expected to appear in a presentation at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). However, Intel has already started working on its second generation of Bonanza Mine chips – the BMZ2.
The chips feature a specialized architecture, specifically designed for the acceleration of SHA-256 processing for Bitcoin mining at ultra-low voltage. Intel claims that the energy-efficient chips will feature “over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256-based mining.”
