Intel to Develop Crypto Mining Accelerators, Claims Circuits Will Deliver ‘1000x Better Performance per Watt’

The California-based technology company and the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, Intel, has revealed the company will “contribute to the development of blockchain technologies” by offering “energy-efficient accelerators.” Intel executive Raja M. Koduri explained that the company expects its circuit innovations will deliver “1000x better performance per watt” than today’s GPU or SHA256-based mining equipment.

On Friday, the senior vice president of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja M. Koduri, published a blog post that discussed blockchain technology and the “new custom compute group.” Koduri explained that Intel is fully aware that there are some blockchains that “translates to an immense amount of energy.” The Intel executive said that the company’s customers are asking for “scalable and sustainable solutions.”

“Intel will engage and promote an open and secure blockchain ecosystem and will help advance this technology in a responsible and sustainable way,” Koduri’s blog post explains.

Intel’s Koduri further added that the company’s first product will ship later in 2022. The first firms that will receive Intel’s blockchain accelerator include Jack Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square), Argo Blockchain, and Griid. Koduri remarked that Intel Labs has been focused on “reliable cryptography, hashing techniques and ultra-low voltage circuits” for decades. The Intel executive expects the company’s accelerator to have better performance per watt.

“We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA256 based mining,” Koduri’s blog post insists.

In order to bolster these concepts, Intel has formed a new custom compute group within the company’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics business unit. ”The objective of this team is to build custom silicon platforms optimized for customers’ workloads, including blockchain and other custom accelerated supercomputing opportunities at the edge,” Koduri’s blog post concludes.

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