Last week chip maker Intel made quite a buzz in the market by announcing that it will soon launch a crypto mining chip in the market. The decision marked Intel’s entry in the crypto business and this development was obviously greeted with great enthusiasm by the crypto industry. But back then intel did not share much information on this chip and the information remained hazy. However, the chip maker has finally brought forth many key information about its crypto mining chip.
Intel shared the information with the public about its mining chip at the ongoing ISSCC 2022 event. The company’s first crypto mining chip will be known as Bonanza Mine Accelerator Chip or BMZ1. This chip comes with 3,600 watt mining rig and total system rate of 40 terahashes per second. A single Intel BMZ1 comes with 300 BMZI chip.
As compared to mining a cryptocurrency on a regular GPU, the intel BMZ1 rig is said to be 1000 percent more power efficient.
But Experts still claim that that Intel’s maiden crypto chip does not compare favorably with existing competitors, at least on the front of mining efficiency. But remaining unfazed by such critical views, intel has said that it has already working on the second version of the BMZ1 called BMZ2. Intel said that BMZ2 will be more powerful and more efficient in mining then its predecessor. Intel hasn’t given the exact timeline as to when BMZ2 will go into production.
It is already public knowledge that Intel’s maiden crypto has already found pretty high profile customers. This includes Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block, Grid and Argo Blockchain.
Intel’s crypto mining chip will be available for sale in the market only later this year. There is still about the pricing of BMZ1 chip. However, it is far too obvious that this chip isn’t target at retail customers.
Although it is still too early to predict whether Intel’s BMZ1 chip will fare in the market, Nvidia’s (one of Intel’s primary competitors) crypto isn’t doing too well in the market. According to the latest, sale of Nvidia’s continues to fall sharply.