APR 2022MAXIMU MPC 11
Jarred Walton
TECH TALK
Jarred Walton has been a
PC and gaming enthusiast
for over 30 years.© INTEL
Big Fish Intel Enters
the Mining Pool
To recap, Bitcoin peaked at over $19,000 in late 2017,
then dropped to around $4,000 by the end of 2018.
Bitcoin prices fluctuated in the $4,000–$12,
range until the latest surge in prices in 2020.
Bitcoin passed the $20,000 mark in December 2020
and hasn’t looked back, with prices ranging from a
low of $33,000 to a high of $65,000—though by the
time you read this, it might have exceeded either of
those boundaries. That volatility perhaps kept Intel
from seriously pursuing mining at the time, but
now it’s ready to dip its toe into the waters.
The initial BMZ1 foray into cryptocurrency
mining took a similar approach to other Bitcoin
ASICs, packing about 137 GH/s of SHA-256 hashing
power into a chip that measured just 14.2mm^2. That
tiny die size means Intel could get around 4,
chips from a single 300mm silicon wafer. While the
hashrate of a single chip is nothing special, modern
Bitcoin miners use hundreds of chips placed on
larger circuit boards. BMZ1 already delivered an
efficiency rating of 18.2 W/TH, which compares
favorably to Bitmain’s S19 Pro ASIC with an
efficiency of 29.5 W/TH. How BMZ1 would scale to
larger mining solutions isn’t clear, but considering
the S19 Pro uses TSMC’s N
process, the fact Intel delivered
higher efficiency using its 14nm
node suggests Bitmain and
other ASIC companies should
be worried.
It’s not just the performance,
of course. One of the big issues
with mining ASICs is their
prohibitively long lead times,
and the fact that companies such
as Bitmain and MicroBT oftenPERHAPS A SIGN of the coming cryptapocalypse, Intel recently disclosed that
it has been testing the waters for mining ASICs for years. It also revealed its
first-generation BMZ1, codenamed Bonanza Mining, and looked ahead to
BMZ2, its second-generation chip that will be manufactured on a cutting-
edge node rather than the 14nm process used for BMZ1. Most surprisingly,
it was noted that BMZ1 was created as a ‘product exploration’ in 2018.
change prices according to the
current value of Bitcoin. Since they
are smaller players in the global
chip market, competing for wafers
at TSMC and other foundries,
supply can be a bit less predictable.
Intel owns a lot of chip fabs and
has much higher volumes from its
CPUs. It could put out a lot of 14nm
BMZ1 chips and conceivably offer
better pricing to big mining firms.
That appears to be the path
forward, as one large mining
firm, GRIID Infrastructure, has
apparently inked a contract
where it will purchase 25 percent
of Intel’s mining ASICs through
2025, with fixed pricing through- GRIID has plans to go public
with an initial estimated valuation
of $3.3 billion, and it intends to
operate three mining facilities
totaling 734 megawatts of power
by 2023. Other mining firms that
will use Intel’s
chips include Argo
Blockchain and
BLOCK (formerly
known as Square).
Intel hasn’t said exactly what
we can expect from BMZ2, but
rumors are it will use TSMC’s N
process. Assuming a similar chip
size to BMZ1, it could potentially
double the hashing power within
similar power constraints. But
Intel’s competitors aren’t sitting
still. There are already rumors of
Bitmain’s S19 XP, using TSMC N
too. Except, it’s said that S19 XP
will only reach an efficiency level of
21.5 W/TH, something Intel already
does on its own 14nm node.
Intel’s Raja Koduri, head of
the Accelerated Computing and
Graphics Business Unit, wrote
about the emerging importance of
blockchain technologies. “We are
declaring our intent to contribute
to the development of blockchain
technologies, with a roadmap of
energy-efficient accelerators. Intel
will engage and promote an open
and secure blockchain ecosystem
and help advance this technology
in a responsible and sustainable
way.” If you were hoping blockchain
and mining would fade away, that’s
not likely to happen any time soon.
Let’s just hope more of it migrates
away from using graphics cards.Intel’s BMZ
chip, codenamed
Bonanza Mining,
is optimized for
Bitcoin’s SHA-
256 algorithm.