Intel hyped up its new chip, which it calls a “blockchain accelerator,” by focusing on both performance and energy efficiency.
In the announcement for its new chip, Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president, says, “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.”
That’s a substantial amount of currency generated per watt of power used compared to graphics cards, which require significant energy to run.
Outside of the preliminary information about the chip, Intel says it will reveal more details about the chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which runs from February 20 through February 24.
Mining cryptocurrency with graphics cards has led to two significant problems. First, there’s the environmental impact caused by all of these GPUs running all day. There’s also the difficulty of finding GPUs. Graphics cards are currently the best way to mine crypto, such as Bitcoin, which makes the cards more desirable. That, along with the chip shortage, makes finding GPUs almost impossible.
Hopefully, Intel’s crypto mining chip lives up to the company’s claims, as it could cause crypto miners to move over to it. That would decrease the strain on the environment and the graphics card shortage.
