Intel Is Making An Energy-Efficient Cryptomining Chip
Intel has announced that it is developing a chip targeted at blockchain-based tasks like cryptomining and will ship later this year, following in the footsteps of fellow silicon giants. For example, Nvidia recently introduced a dedicated GPU for "professional mining" under the CMP HX family at a rather steep price. Cryptomining has triggered a massive GPU shortage, with scalpers selling them at a high premium to miners while gaming enthusiasts struggle to find one at a reasonable price.
Prices have gone up, and even the likes of Best Buy are milking the opportunity by pushing Nvidia's latest RTX 3000-series GPU behind a $200 subscription paywall. But it appears that CPUs are next. The new Raptoreum (RTM) cryptocurrency favors processors with a huge cache, which AMD's latest Ryzen processors offer. Experts have voiced concern that if enough miners jump on the Raptoreum bandwagon, a shortage of AMD Ryzen processors might be next. Amidst all this volatility, Intel has officially announced its crypto silicon plans.
Related: Intel's Alder Lake Laptop CPUs Are Ridiculously Powerful
Intel says it is developing a chip — something it calls a "blockchain accelerator" — targeted squarely at cryptomining. And among the first customers of Intel's chips is Block, a company led by former Twitter CEO and an open admirer of blockchain tech, Jack Dorsey. «We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining,» notes Raja Koduri, senior vice president at Intel. Koduri recently remarked that the existing internet-computing infrastructure would need a thousand-fold boost to realize the ambitious metaverse dreams. As for the
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