Raja M. Koduri, senior vice president of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group at Intel, announced that Intel will develop energy-efficient crypto mining accelerators that are expected to hit the market even later this year. At the Solid-State Circuits Conference later this month, the company plans to unveil a new generation of specialized application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for crypto mining.
In addition, a new International Solid-State Circuits Conference is to be formed within Koduri’s department, with responsibility for custom silicon platforms to optimize blockchain mining performance and supercomputer development.
According to the company, the new innovations will provide blockchain accelerators that have 1000 x better performance per watt of energy consumed per time unit than the conventional GPUs used to mine blockchain networks and use SHA-256 encryption.
Especially in bitcoin mining where the difficulty has risen so high, GPUs have long been replaced by ASICs because of profitability. The situation is different in Ethereum, where many miners still use GPUs. Intel itself had shown little interest in the crypto industry in the past. The only noteworthy action in the field was the purchase of shares in Coinbase.