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.
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 SHA-256 term mentioned by Koduri, it is short for Secure Hashing Algorithm that processes a random size input and gives a fixed-sized 256-bit token as the output. It forms the backbone of the Bitcoin protocol, tasked with the responsibility of creating addresses on the blockchain and verifying transactions.
Intel hasn't shared many technical details about its upcoming chip but has promised to shed more light on its architecture at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) conference later this month. As per the event's official brochure, Intel's presentation will be about "An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC." An ASIC is short for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, and it essentially refers to a chip designed with a singular purpose in mind. ASICs for mining cryptocurrencies is actually a thing and relatively popular too. More importantly, Koduri writes that Intel's crypto-mining chip is being designed not to impact the supply of its existing products. That's a considerable promise because Intel is prepping its dedicated GPUs under the ARC brand, and that too, at a time of industry-wide, is having GPU shortage and supply-side semiconductor crunch.
It appears that rather than dissuading crypto miners from hogging its ARC GPUs the way NVIDIA did by reducing hash rates, Intel will be giving them a dedicated chip designed with cryptocurrency mining as the only purpose. Intel's announcement also adds that it is developing "the most energy-efficient computing technologies" for blockchain applications, which is again a topic of hot discussion. Blockchain-based activities, especially cryptomining and minting NFTs, have drawn a lot of flak because of their high-energy demand and environmental impact. It remains to be seen how Intel's crypto-focused chip navigates around those concerns while keeping its offering competitive in a market where NVIDIA and AMD GPUs reign supreme.
Source: Intel