Cryptocurrency mining requires a lot of power regardless whether you use a ASIC miner or GPU, and Intel wants to change that with its ‘blockchain accelerator’ that’s set to ship later this year.
Intel’s crypto chip is made to mine cryptocurrencies with the SHA-256 algorithm such as Bitcoin, Intel’s chief architect in graphics Raja Koduri says that customers can expect 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs, which sounds very promising and more details will be revealed at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference on February 20th.
Cryptocurrency mining has caused a huge environmental impact in recent times and it has also been one of the reasons that caused GPU shortages around the world, though companies like NVIDIA has created LHR version of cards to discourage miners from buying up their cards, that still didn’t stop mining software such as NBMiner from cracking that hash rate limiter to realize 70% of the GPU’s mining performance.
Perhaps with Intel’s new chip, miners might actually have a second alternative to ASIC miners and GPUs for crypto mining activities, companies such as GRIID Infrastructures and Jack Dorsey’s owned fintech company Block have already placed orders for the chip so it could be quite the real deal, but details of whether Intel intends to sell the chip to consumers is still unknown for now.
Source: Intel