Intel to Enter Bitcoin Mining Market With Energy-Efficient GPU

pcmag.com:

Intel is entering the blockchain mining market with an upcoming GPU capable of mining Bitcoin. 

Intel insists the effort won’t put a strain energy supplies or deprive consumers of chips. The goal is to create the most energy-efficient blockchain mining equipment on the planet, it says.

“We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1,000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining,” Intel's General Manager for Graphics, Raja Koduri, said in the announcement. (SHA-256 is a reference to the mining algorithm used to create Bitcoins.)

News of Intel’s blockchain-mining effort first emerged last month after the ISSCC technology conference posted details about an upcoming Intel presentation titled: “Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC.” ASICs are chips designed for a specific purpose, and also refer to dedicated hardware to mine Bitcoin. Friday’s announcement from Koduri added that Intel is establishing a new “Custom Compute Group” to create chip platforms optimized for customers' workloads, including for blockchains.

Koduri also said Intel is working with customers that share its environmental sustainability goals for blockchain mining. “Argo Blockchain, Block (formerly known as Square) and Griid Infrastructure are among our first customers for this upcoming product. This architecture is implemented on a tiny piece of silicon so that it has minimal impact to the supply of current products,” he added. 

The effort will likely shake up competition in the ASIC Bitcoin-mining industry when some of the largest providers, such as Bitmain, come from China.

Intel’s first blockchain-mining hardware is slated to begin shipping