Computer chip manufacturing giant Intel Corporation has shared details of a new mining chip that will be coupled with a high-performance 3,600-watt miner with the ultimate goal of improving Bitcoin (BTC) mining efficiency.
Intel revealed its first-generation product exploration chip during the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2022, a conference dedicated to the electronics and chip manufacturing industry.
According to the company, Bonanza Mine (BMZ1) is an ultra-low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC that can deliver 40 terahashes per second (TH/s).
As Cointelegraph previously reported, Intel’s patent related to “high-performance Bitcoin Mining” dates back to November 2018, which proposed to reduce overall power consumption by approximately 15%. Intel representatives at the time showed confidence in competing against established players, including Bitmain, MicroBT and Nvidia:
“Intel has done design work around SHA 256 optimized ASICs for several years beginning with pathfinding work done in Intel Labs.”
The SHA-256 ASIC referred to in the paper being presented at ISSCC was Intel’s first generation product exploration from 2018. Intel will share more details about the upcoming blockchain accelerator at a later time.
Intel’s next-generation BTC miner will be able to deliver a balanced performance of 40.4 TH/s by drawing 2,293W of power — recording a low energy consumption of 56.97 joules per terahash (J/TH). When compared to Bitmain’s hardware, the Antminer S19j ASIC Bitcoin miner consumes 3,100W to deliver up to 90 TH/s at room temperature, resulting in an efficiency of 34.5 J/TH.
In addition, the hardware will also have the option to operate in high-performance and power-saving modes to optimize the energy-cost ratio across various degrees of mining efficiencies.
Intel has yet to announce a date for its official launch along with the technical requirements of the second-generation mining setup.
Related: Bitcoin difficulty reaches all-time high, hash rate up 45% in 6 months
The Bitcoin network mining difficulty maintains an upward trend, showcasing a strong indication of growing resilience against network attacks.
At its peak, Bitcoin recorded a hash rate of 248.11 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Feb. 13 after jumping 31.69% from 188.40 EH/s in just one day.
With the increase in the hash rate, BTC mining equipment needs to evolve for delivering higher performance while consuming the same energy comparatively.