Image credit – Intel Corporation
Right now, how a lot of cryptocurrency is being farmed relies heavily on GPUs. This is why many GPUs are low on stock because miners keep snapping them up. It is also a very inefficient way of mining as it consumes a lot of power and only those who can scale up their operations can truly make it profitable.
To help remedy the issue of the amount of energy that crypto mining consumes, Intel has since unveiled a blockchain chip which they’re calling a “blockchain accelerator”. Not much is known about the chip for now, except that according to Intel’s SVP Raja Koduri, it will be a more energy-efficient piece of hardware.
According to Koduri, “We are mindful that some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates to an immense amount of energy. Our customers are asking for scalable and sustainable solutions, which is why we are focusing our efforts on realizing the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale.”
He adds, “We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining.” So far, it seems that Intel already has at least two customers – a company called GRIID and Block, formerly known as Square and is also owned by Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey.
Filed in . Read more about Cryptocurrency and Intel. Source: intel
