Antminer E9, Bitmain ASIC as powerful as 32 GeForce RTX 3080 in Ethereum mining

Bitmain, a Chinese company that designs hardware for mining, anticipated the upcoming arrival of Antminer E9, an ASIC for mining of Ethereum performance beyond the reach of any video card.

The GPU is now a GPGPU, i.e. it is capable of doing generic calculations (General Purpose), while an ASIC is a Application Specific Integrated Circuit, therefore, a chip that was created with a specialized purpose: in this way it is able to achieve performance and efficiency that are impossible for any more generic solution.

Antminer E9 should touch a hash rate in Ethereum mining up to 3 GH / s (3000 MH / s), equivalent to 25 GeForce RTX 3090 (120 MH / s), 32 GeForce RTX 3080 (94 MH / s) or 115 Nvidia CMP 30HX (26 MH / s). It is even higher than Linzhi’s Phoenix Ethash ASIC which stops at 2600 MH / s.

The Chinese designer didn’t reveal many details about the Antminer E9, but he said a consumption up to 2556W and an efficiency of 0.85 J / M, data that therefore make it not only faster than the Phoenix miner, but also more efficient, as for the latter we are talking about 3000W. In a nutshell, it is 15.3% more powerful and 14.8% more efficient.

Before talking about an escape of miners from video cards to embrace Antminer E9 (which gamers strongly hope) we must wait for the price, a data that is currently not available. Second estimates, Antminer E9 may have a list price over $ 20,000, but even if the outlay goes up to $ 30,000, it could be a very attractive option for miners when you consider that today buying 32 GeForce RTX 3080s, with an average price of $ 2,500, requires you to put $ 80,000 on the plate.

Antminer E9 could undermine the good start of Nvidia CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor) cards, created to drive the demand of miners away from GeForce solutions. In the fourth quarter, Nvidia estimated a total sale of GPUs to miners between 100 and 300 million dollars, while in the past few weeks the company has revised upwards the sales forecasts of CMP solutions in the first quarter, increasing them three times from 50 to 150 million dollars.

However, we are quite certain that, even if Bitmain were to be able to produce Antminer E9 in volumes (the shortage of components exists for everyone, so we doubt it), the situation of the availability of GeForce cards on the market will hardly change drastically. Let’s hope we’re wrong, but now all companies are talking about a very long-lasting shortage, up to 2023, so Antminer E9 will not be the solution to all evils.