Intel's Crypto Mining Accelerator Is 1,000 Times Faster Than Rivals, Claims Top Executive

Intel is investing in blockchain technology with a new chip that could be used to mine cryptocurrency and the company's key focus, according to Senior Vice President of Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja Koduri, is on sustainability with plans to "develop the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale." Koduri claims that Intel's new mining chips will be available later this year with US electric power company GRIID Infrastructure, crypto mining firm Argo Blockchain, and Jack Dorsey-led Block among the first clients in line to receive the first batch of mining chips.

In a press release, Koduri said that Intel's new custom compute group will "contribute to the development of blockchain technologies with a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators."

Koduri said that crypto mining and blockchains in general "require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates to an immense amount of energy". The chipmaker, therefore, aims to produce energy-efficient chips to tackle this issue. "Our customers are asking for scalable and sustainable solutions, which is why we are focusing our efforts on realising the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale."

These new application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) — specialised processors specifically designed to execute one type of workload; in this case, crypto mining — were earlier leaked under the "Bonanza" codename. Intel has now confirmed that these so-called blockchain accelerators will indeed be released later this year. Thanks to decades worth of research on cryptography and hashing techniques, Intel appears to be confident that these new ultra-low-voltage crypto mining ASICs will be able to provide "1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining."

The company plans to provide more details on its crypto mining and blockchain efforts at the upcoming International Solid State Circuit Conference, which is set to kick off in San Francisco on February 20. Koduri also stated that the new architecture will be implemented on a tiny piece of silicon so that it has minimal impact on the supply of current products.