Intel announces energy-efficient crypto chip 

Intel announces energy-efficient crypto chip 

Business Crypto news Technology
March 5, 2022 by Super System
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intel and crypto

Intel Invests into blockchain technology with new chip 

Intel is entering into the world of blockchain technology thanks to a chip that is designed to mine cryptocurrency. Intel will place emphasis on sustainable practices and it plans on bringing that to live by “developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.”

The Intel chip will be the first of its kind for the company. Intel has tagged this crypto-focused chip “blockchain accelerator”, and it will get into the market sometime in 2022. As it stands, a number of companies are already preordering the chip including GRIID a Bitcoin mining company, and Block(formerly known as square), the Jack Dorsey-owned fintech company. 

“We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining,” Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president explained. He referred to the SHA-256 hashing algorithm used to generate a number of cryptocurrency including Bitcoin. 

Intel Invests into blockchain
Intel Invests into blockchain

We can expect more information about the chip very soon as Intel plans to make more information available at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference later this month. The company will give a presentation titled “Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low-Voltage Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC,” on February 23rd. The ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) is a task specific chip. It is designed to carry out one task like mining of cryptocurrency. 

One of the growing concerns about cryptocurrency mining is their environmental impact. However, Intel’s new chip is a way to address that problem. In the last few years, powerful mining rigs have had to rely on energy from coal, and natural gas plants, and these sources cause serious harm to the environment, and also cause high cost of electricity and blackouts. The environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining has even been presented to Congress by US lawmakers. There was a time when US lawmakers demanded that Bitcoin companies divulge the total energy consumed mining Bitcoin

There is no denying that the cost and energy of mining crypto is on the high side, however the introduction of the Intel chip can make life easy for miners and the environment.