At the virtual IEEE 2022 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel revealed their new mining Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) BonanzaMine to rival Bitfury, Bitmain, and Canaan mining equipment.
The Silicon Valley chip giant made its first push into cryptocurrency mining earlier this month. The ASIC is “1000 times” faster than existing Graphics Processing Units, according to Intel. Mining, a procedure through which “miners” earn a limited quantity of cryptocurrency by solving cryptographic problems to validate transactions on a blockchain, was done mainly on graphics processing units in its early years.
At the conference, Intel also demonstrated their BonanzaMine System, which consists of 300 BonanzaMine ASICs with a throughput of 40 THash and consumes 3.6kW of electricity. If necessary, Intel states that higher hash rates can be attained. The BonanzaMine system, according to Intel, is virtually on par with the Bitfury Clarke and Canaan Avalon A9, two major industry participants. At 47.7 terahashes per second (TH/s), Intel’s technology consumes 55 joules per terahash. At 56 J/TH, the Bitfury Clarke can accomplish 40 TH/s, while the Canaan Avalon A9 sits at 30 TH/s at 58 J/TH.
The ASIC unit has four hash boards, a controller, four fans, and a power supply that can be customised. Each board carries 75 ASICs that are handled as a 25-chip voltage stack, allowing input voltages of 8.875V divided into 355mV for each ASIC group. The power delivery is optimised by stacking 25 chips on each die. At 355mV, the BonanzaMine ASIC demonstrated a stable 1.35-1.6 GHz operation. A microcontroller is built into each hash board to check temperature and voltage.
The core component of the ASIC is a twin SHA-256 hash engine, which was created with bitcoin mining in mind. The BonanzaMine system was made possible by Intel’s technical expertise in cryptography, hashing algorithms, and low-voltage techniques.
It will be interesting to see if Intel can compete with Bitmain. The Antminer S19 Pro from Bitmain is the most successful ASIC available. The BonanzaMine, like Bitmain, is made using a seven nanometer process, according to Intel. Because there is no standard for the size of a seven-nanometer chip, this could just be a marketing blitz.
Although no launch dates for the chip have been announced, Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Business Unit will form a new Custom Compute Group to design processors for a variety of applications. Block, formerly Square, and GRIID, a crypto startup, are two of Intel’s early clients for the new mining technology.