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 realizing the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.”
These new application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) — specialized 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.”
