Intel has made the engineering parameters of their Bonanza Mine bitcoin miner tools public.
The world’s largest computer chip manufacturer has revealed specifics of a new mining chip that will be paired with a high-performance 3,600-watt miner with the purpose of increasing Bitcoin (BTC) mining efficiency.
The chip manufacturer filed a patent in November 2018 for “high-performance Bitcoin mining,” which claimed a 15 percent reduction in aggregate energy consumed. At the time, the company’s executives expressed optimism in contending against established companies such as Bitmain, MicroBT, and Nvidia:
“Intel has done design work around SHA 256 optimized ASICs for several years beginning with pathfinding work done in Intel Labs.”
During the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) edition of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2022, a conference dedicated to the electronics and chip manufacturing industries, Intel unveiled their second-generation BTC mining rig. Bonanza Mine (BMZ2) is a low-voltage, energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC that can provide 40 terahashes per second (TH/s), according to the firm.
Intel’s current state of Bitcoin mining
Bitcoin mining is now done with specialized hardware known as an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). According to the technical specs revealed during the conference, each Bonanza Mine (BMZ1) miner carries 300 BMZ1 chips. The “one-subscript” in the nomenclature denotes that the miner hardware is of the first generation.
These 300 BMZ1 together produce 3,600 watts (W) of power while generating 40 terahash per second (TH/s) of processing power. This latter standard falls short of the hash rate quoted by the market’s main miners.
Bitmain’s Antminer S19 and S19 Pro have hashing speeds of 95 to 110 TH/s, whereas MicroBT’s WhatsMiner M30S hashing speeds of up to 112 TH/s. Bitmain is even releasing a new liquid-cooled miner with a throughput of up to 198 TH/s, according to the company.
Despite the fact that the chip manufacturer’s solution lacks the hashing power of its competitors, the company claims that the BMZ1 is more energy efficient. Block and Argo are among the elevated customers who have already placed purchase orders.
However, it’s unclear whether the company will supply simply BMZ1 chips for customers to integrate into their mining rigs or whether the 3,600 W miners will be shipped to consumers.