Intel announces its new high-efficiency “Blockchain Accelerators” and a new division to create custom SOCs

Following its appearance on the schedule for the upcoming International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel officially revealed that it is working on new “Blockchain Accelerators,” or basically, ASICs for high-efficiency mining. This was announced by the company:

Today, we at Intel declare our intention to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies, with a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators. Intel will participate in and promote an open and secure blockchain ecosystem and help advance this technology in a responsible and sustainable manner.

We are aware that some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates into an immense amount of energy. Our customers ask for scalable and sustainable solutions, so we are focusing our efforts on realizing the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy efficient computing technologies at scale.

Our blockchain accelerator will ship later this year. We are directly engaged with customers who share our sustainability goals. 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 small piece of silicon so that it has minimal impact on current product delivery.

Unfortunately Intel did not offer performance figures either in terms of hashrate or in terms of percentage compared to the competition. The only figure they gave is that their new chip is more than 1000 times more efficient than a GPU in SHA-256 based mining, although we all know that GPUs are not good at it so it is not a good comparison. We may have to wait until February 23 to find out its full details at the International Conference on Solid State Circuits, where the company will provide more details about this new chip called “Bonanza Mine”.

Intel also announced the “Personalized Computing Group”, in charge of this project, among others

Alongside the announcement of its new “Blockchain Accelerators,” Intel also announced its Custom Computing Group, a subdivision of the Graphics and Accelerated Computing Systems business unit headed by Raja Koduri. “The goal of this team is to build custom silicon platforms optimized for our customers’ workloads, including blockchain and other custom computing opportunities,” the company stated.

In this way, we will have to wait until almost two weeks to know the full details of this Intel chip, although its existence and its launch this year is already official.

What do you think about Intel entering the mining ASIC market with its new “Blockchain Accelerators”? Do you think they will improve the energy efficiency of the Bitcoin chain?