Semiconductor behemoth Intel (INTC) made an official announcement regarding its crypto mining initiative on Friday, disclosing that Argo Blockchain (ARGO) and Jack Dorsey-led Block (SQ) will be receiving the chipmaker’s first mining chips in the latter part of 2022.
Raja M. Koduri, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, stated in a Friday blog post that Intel will be contributing to blockchain technology through a “roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators.” According to Koduri, the company is “aware” that blockchains will be absorbing a lot of energy, and that is the reason for them to focus on “energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.”
In January, Intel made a revelation that they were working on mining ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) designated “Bonanza Mine”, when a product release was incorporated on the schedule for a forthcoming semiconductor conference.
A spokesperson for Argo made a conformation to CoinDesk that they had signed an agreement for purchasing Intel’s mining ASICs.
Griid Infrastructure has entered into a supply contract for Intel’s brand-new mining ASICs. Till 2025, Griid infrastructure has received a commitment from Intel that it will be selling at least 25% of its mining ASIC production as part of the contract.
According to Koduri, the mining ASICs will be providing “1000x better performance per watt in comparison with mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining.” ASICs are predominantly used by huge professional miners for bitcoin mining, so the comparison of the graphics processing unit (GPU) may be less relevant for them.
Koduri also stated that the chips are constructed on a “tiny piece of silicon,” so that Intel’s current product supply won’t be impacted.
Intel also announced a Custom Compute Group inside the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics division, which will be building custom silicon platforms for blockchain and other kinds of computing.
Block, led by Twitter’s founder, is developing an open-source bitcoin mining system for decentralizing the network.
