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As part of ISSCC 2022, Intel engineers will take part in a demo session on Bonanza Mine: an ultra-low voltage ASIC for efficient bitcoin mining.
Intel Diamond MESA eASIC. © Intel
The International Conference on Semiconductor Circuits or ISSCC will be held from February 19 to 26 and our colleagues from the site Tom’s Hardware noted the holding of a demo session by Intel engineers about an ultra-low voltage ASIC called Bonanza Mine. This will aim to mine bitcoin more efficiently.
As a reminder, an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a specialized processor capable of performing only specific tasks. Which is both its strength and its weakness. It can thus execute the application for which it is designed very efficiently, but the downside is that it can only do that and cannot be reprogrammed like an FPGA circuit.
Antminer T19 mining ASIC. © Bitmain
Currently, bitcoin mining is no longer done with graphics cards, but with ASICs that are much more efficient and above all more efficient than the latter. The Chinese manufacturer Bitmain has been monopolizing this market since 2013 with its ASIC-based Antminer for both bitcoin (SHA-256) and ethereum (Ethash) engraved in 5 nm at TSMC.
Intel, for its part, filed a patent in 2018 on a 15% more efficient bitcoin mining process applicable to an ASIC. Some of the engineers who filed this patent will participate in the demonstration of the Intel Bonanza Mine ASIC during the ISSCC on February 23 at 4:00 p.m. (Paris time).
No impact on graphics card availability
The release of an ASIC by Intel – as efficient as it is – will however have no impact on the availability of graphics cards. As specified, it is an ASIC based on bitcoin’s own SHA-256 algorithm. Ethereum, which currently hogs available graphics cards, is not based on this algorithm. To hope to see an improvement in the availability of graphics cards, we will have to wait for the switch to ethereum 2.0 planned for this year and making GPU mining obsolete.