Intel’s interest in the crypto space began to be talked about in January, when the existence of the ASIC Bonanza Mine and the agreement with a startup in the crypto mining sector called GRIID leaked. But at that time company had not made any comments so far, but today it has decided to come out.
Intel Corporation has officially confirmed plans to enter the market of specialized blockchain and mining accelerators.
Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel, has confirmed that in 2022 the company will release a dedicated Bonanza Mine processor for cryptocurrency mining to early Intel customers, including former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Block (formerly Square), as well as mining companies Argo Blockchain and GRIID Infrastructure.
Intel has not yet disclosed the technical characteristics of the new chip, more detailed information about it will be presented on February 23 at the ISSCC (International Solid-State Circuits Conference). However, the head of Koduri claims that its performance per watt is 1000 times higher than conventional mining GPUs based on the SHA-256 algorithm.
These new Intel chips, unlike other components and hardware designed specifically to optimize hashrate, is not intended as a solution specifically targeting the cryptocurrency industry but instead points to the broader blockchain ecosystem.
Intel says its chip is an energy-efficient “accelerator” designed to speed up the processing of blockchain tasks that require huge computing power and therefore consume a lot of energy.
