KnC Makes Good on a Promise: 20nm Neptunes to Ship This Week

Stockholm’s KnCMiner announced Tuesday that 20 nanometer Neptune ASIC processors were going through final checks and would be heading onto customers by the week’s end.

This makes KnCMiner the first company to make such processors available to end users, “beating all competitors to the 20nm stage, including the likes of Intel, Apple and Samsung,” the company said in a statement.

Here are the stats on the Neptune, a processor “tailor-made for the Bitcoin market”:

● Size – 1440 cores in a 55 x 55 mm package

● Number of chips – 5

● Hashing speed – 3 TH/s

● Electricity consumption – 2.1 kw at the wall, or about 0.7 watts per GH/s

The 20 processors shipping this week comprise Batch 1; Batch 2 is set to ship by the end of the month. Both batches 1 and 2 are already sold out, and the company is taking pre-orders on Batch 3.

As excited as the KnCMiner staff sounded to begin shipping the Neptunes, the company’s PR firm upped the enthusiasm:

“There has been a lot of confusion and anger with high-end Bitcoin mining rig companies across the blogosphere of late, with even the BBB getting involved in the case of one producer. This week, however, KnCMiner will be taking concrete steps to allay that industry anger and confusion by doing what so few in the high-end Bitcoin mining industry actually do: ship.”