Interesting! It would be a game changer for sure, if Intel decides to hop in to the btc asic game.

As I posted on Discord Considering that Intel is one of the handful of Foundries that have the EUV litho equipment required to produce chips with 7nm and smaller gate sizes it makes sense for them to put it to good use by practicing on mining chips.

Well it looks like I am going to eat my words from what I have been saying around here for a while.
I REALLY thought that Intel would never enter such a niche market. They have for years only been about CPUs, memory, things that can be sold to everyone everywhere.
Yes, they always had some smaller product lines, but that was usually obtained from when they bought other businesses. Something like this developed in house has been rare from them as of late.

As others have said, lets see how it pans out in terms of efficiency & cost & availability.

-Dave

I wonder if they would ever make these commercially given the bad press crypto mining has been getting recently.

Intel are a global household name, and getting involved in the "dirty eco-killing" mining business might a PR step in the wrong direction.

AFAIK that's what they're going to sell. That's their main business anyway, selling chips. Sometimes they do sell end products like the NUC, but that's the minority.

It would be really interesting to have a small unit at home that doesn't produce a lot of noise and heat and yet still gets you a bit of bitcoin every day through a pool.

Good read.


and an interesting conflict in the story

in that 55 watts a th vs  18 watts a th are both listed As the power  used.

a board with 25 chips burning 2.5 watts = 62.5 watts does 3.425 th if 25 x .137 is correct.

62.5/3.425 = 18.24 watts a th.

now we all know  fans and a controller and other shit = some power.

But I can say 3 boards = 187.5 watts

maybe a six board rig pulling 375 watts + other parts say 75 watts = a 450 watt miner that does 21 th is possible

that makes it 21 or 22 watts a th which is better than all gear other than the s19xp

And if set to be a 450 watt unit it would  be a nice item.

Well if 500 watts and 20th are possible at a good price the small guy will buy it.

It makes sense for mega farms to once again be able to secure mining chips and just have their own custom miners built from them. Virtually every major data center does that with custom server mobo's and storage solutions tailored to their specific needs that they designed together with the actual hardware vendors that build them for the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Hulu, Netflix etc. For new build outs I foresee most being liquid cooled setups rather like BM's ANTRACKS. Gives the maximum power density per cu/ft with none of the problems of scaling up immersion tank setups. Air cooling should be right-out.

Whenever I see farms like this I always have to ask  -- why in the hell...? Noise be damned, maint of the fans and PSU's has to employ over a dozen techs and other support people just to keep up with expected failure rates...
And by today's standards that farm in the above pic was a fairly small operation...

eg...
 

Way back around 2013 there was a 'monster' farm in Oregon that rolled their own miners using BitFury chip and their own hashboard designs. Somewhere I have an article saying their were pulling over $250k a day in BTC rewards...

maybe the shift of mining away from China and Russia is coming.

Could be interesting for us all.

Admist all this talk, has anyone actually looked at the size of the BZ1 chip?

14.1 mm<sup>2 and only 137 GH? At 4000 per wafer each chip would cost a customer around $3 - it's got to be the worst mining deal for years,  $23 per TH versus a standard cell implementation of around $5 ?

I'm really disappointed in Intel, perhaps the second iteration will do much better.</sup>

Well, Bitmain's 1397 chip was their 2nd crack at 7nm and is about 25mm² and best efficiency of 30w/th when running ~280GH/sec. So hashrate per die area is pretty close between the two.

We also don't know what the high end of the hashrate might be on Intel's chip, what is quoted is most likely just the most efficient operating conditions, so it can likely run much faster at lower efficiency.

So I'd say Intel put Bitmain to shame, destroying their efficiency # at the same node size right out of the gate.