Intel’s new crypto chip Blockchain Accelerator is said to be energy efficient | Digit

Intel announced their new investment in blockchain technology with a new energy-efficient chip for mining cryptocurrency.  The company has adopted sustainability and has future plans to develop some more energy-efficient technology. 

Intel’s first venture in crypto chips is named “Blockchain Accelerator”, which was announced by the company in their blog. The company has started taking pre-orders. The chip is set to be launched in the market later this year.  It already has a Bitcoin mining company, GRIID Infrastructure and  Argo Blockchain, Block also formerly known as Square as their first buyers. 

Intel crypto chip details

Raja M. Koduri,  Intel’s Senior Vice President and General Manager at the company’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group in the blog post mentioned going into this project they were aware of the enormous energy consumption that happens during mining a blockchain and hence they focused on creating an energy-efficient computing technology to retain the full potential of a blockchain.

He further mentioned that it has taken decades of dedicated research to cultivate the chip and they expect that their technology will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining.

More details about the chip will be made available at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which commences on February 20. Intel will make a presentation titled “Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC”. ASIC serves the sole purpose of Cryptocurrency mining. Intel will deliver their presentation on day 2 of the ISCC on  February 23. 

Blockchain and Cryptocurrency are only gaining momentum as time goes but Cryptocurrency mining has raised several environmental concerns due to the heavy consumption of energy which Intel’s new chip aims to tackle.