A new Intel Bitcoin mining chip might be unveiled in the upcoming International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2022. Leakers teased that this "Bonanza Mine" processor would be one of the best processors for mining of cryptocurrency.
Many fans are probably familiar with Intel, one of the oldest and most successful semiconductor companies in the world. Intel is famous for its gaming processors, alongside its rivals AMD and Nvidia.
More recently, reports indicate Intel might be joining the Bitcoin-mining hardware industry. This created hype among fans who got curious about Intel's newest chips.
Intel Bitcoin Mining Chip: A Miner Processor
Fans got their first clue about this mysterious new processor in Dr. Lupo's live stream last December 29, 2021, with Intel's Systems and Graphics Architect, Senior Vice President, and GM Raja Koduri.
When asked about the GPU market, Koduri said, "GPUs will do graphics, gaming, and all those wonderful things. But being able to do much more efficient blockchain validation at a much lower cost, much lower power, is a pretty solvable problem," as transcribed by Tom's Hardware.
Koduri emphasized that Intel "was working" on this blockchain processing problem. He also said, "hopefully not too far into the future, we will kinda share some interesting hardware for that."
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What Is Intel Bonanza Mine Chip
Shockingly enough, the ISSCC 2022 program schedule revealed an entry called "Bonanza Mine: an ultra-low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC." It is authored by three Intel employees, one of them being Vikam Suresh.
PC World quickly pointed out that Suresh is a research scientist at Intel Labs who focuses on "high-performance and energy-efficient micro-architecture and circuit design for data encryption and authentication, design of cryptographic primitives for random number and key generation, and block-chain technologies and high-performance data compression."
Taking all these clues together, fans speculate that an Intel-powered crypto mining hardware will debut in the upcoming event.
Intel Bonanza Mine Chip: Specs and Features
It should be emphasized that this new chip is an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miner. For reference, these are specialized processors designed to execute one type of workload. Overall, ASIC miners promote efficiency and performance advantages in mining over more traditional CPUs and GPUs.
It is worth noting that if Intel launches this product in the market, it might soon compete with the likes of Bitmain over the ASIC merchandise.
Note, however, that there is not much official information about the chip itself. There are no leaks pertaining to its hashrate, power consumption and system optimization. However, all of this might be revealed in the ISSCC 2022 presentation. Tom's Hardware pointed out that since the program included a "DS1 moniker," there should be a video demo of the chip at the event.
Full details for this mysterious chip will be available on February 23 at 7 AM PST. The ISSCC 2022 will be a virtual-only event. Fans interested in joining can search for the guidelines on the ISSCC official website.
