Intel Unveils Bonanza Mine Chip for Bitcoin Mining

The upcoming chip will be the most powerful and energy-efficient option in the market, according to the company.

1000x Better Than a GPU

Intel is making a move into the Blockchain and cryptocurrency industry with its imminent Bonanza Mine chip. Now, the chipmaker has offered some insights into what to expect when it arrives. The details of the Bitcoin-mining chip came at ISSCC 2022, a global forum for presentations of circuit and chip innovations.

The new power-efficient chip is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This means that it will serve a specific purpose (in this case, Bitcoin mining), rather than have general applications. According to Intel, it offers a very significant energy-efficient performance boost, compared to using a graphics processor.

“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,” claimed senior vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing Systems at Intel, Raja M. Koduri.

Bundling the Bonanza Mine chips in stacks of 300 onto a 3,600-watt Bitcoin mining rig will result in a machine with a 40 terahashes per second (TH/s) system hash rate.

Intel has not announced a launch date for the ASIC.

Bitcoin Mining Impact

Bitcoin mining is the process of introducing new units of the digital currency by solving extremely complicated mathematical problems. Miners validate new blocks of cryptocurrency transactions and add them to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Mining has gathered scathing criticism due to its high energy consumption resulting in high costs of electricity and environmental degradation. Earlier in the year, Kosovo’s government banned crypto mining as the Balkan country grappled with an energy crisis.

Intel is confident that its new chip will play a part in alleviating the problem.