Semiconductor company Intel has reported the development of an energy efficient chip for blockchain and crypto mining.
The blockchain accelerator as it is styled is due to ship later this year.
In a company posting, Raja M. Koduri, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said Intel was declaring its intent to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies, with a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators.
“We are mindful that some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates to an immense amount of energy,” he said.
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“Our customers are asking for scalable and sustainable solutions, which is why we are focusing our efforts on realising the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.”
To this end, Intel has formed the new Custom Compute Group within the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics business unit. Its objective is to build custom silicon platforms optimised for customers’ workloads, including blockchain and other custom accelerated supercomputing opportunities at the edge.
Koduri said that Intel was engaging directly with customers, with the crypto miners Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square and focussed on digital financial services) and GRIID Infrastructure among the first customers for the upcoming product.
With its circuit innovations, Intel anticipates delivering a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining, i.e. for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.
Intel’s entry into the blockchain and crypto chip business will bring some competition in a market still dominated by China’s Bitmain, which is believed to supply about three-quarters of the global crypto chip requirements.
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