Intel Developing “Bonanza Mine” Chip for Bitcoin Mining

Tsing

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Intel could be getting into the Bitcoin-mining hardware business.



As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Intel will be showing up at this year’s ISSCC conference with a presentation regarding a new development called the “Bonanza Mine,” an ultra-low-voltage and energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC. An acronym for Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, ASICs are typically chosen by miners who are seeking greater power efficiency than that provided by the typical GPU mining rig.



“Intel has done design work around SHA 256 optimized ASICs for several years beginning with pathfinding work done in Intel Labs, the company told the publication in a statement. “We will share more details in the future.”



Intel previously confirmed that its upcoming Arc Alchemist graphics cards will not launch with a cryptocurrency mining limiter. Raja Koduri, Intel’s Systems and...
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Maybe Intel will be able to bring some efficiency to the bitcoin mining craze. Maybe give miners something other than video cards to buy up.
 
Bitcoin isn't what's hogging all the GPUs -- from my understanding, Bitcoin has only been profitable in the realm of ASICs for several years now.

So I guess Intel is going after Bitmain and MicroBT? Not a lot of players in the mining-specific ASIC space, but if nations-worth gigawatts of power are getting burned on mining, there's a decent chunk of hardware sales going on somewhere.

Alchemist (will presumably) and every other GPU mine primarily Etherium or other random minor alt-coins.
 
Between this and Alchemist... It smells like "We wasted an entire decade trying to dig our fab out of a hole, now we need to find new growth sectors pronto!"

That's before they wasted decade before that, where they tried to grow via ... web cams, antivirus, and putting x86 in mobile/IoT chips.
 
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