Intel “Bonanza-Mine” ist ein Bitcoin-Mining-ASIC, Intel sieht endlich, wo das Geld ist

Intel is reportedly looking to disrupt the cryptocurrency mining hardware business with fixed-function ASICs that either outperform GPUs, or end up with lower enough performance/Watt or performance/Dollar to take make GPUs unviable as a mining hardware option. The company is planning to unveil its first such product, Codename “Bonanza-Mine,” an ASIC purpose-built for Bitcoin mining.

Since it’s an ASIC, “Bonanza-Mine” doesn’t appear to be a re-purposed Xe-HPC processor, or even an FPGA that’s been programmed to mine Bitcoin. It’s a purpose-built piece of silicon. Intel will unveil “Bonanza-Mine” at the 2022 ISSCC-Konferenz. It describes the chip as being an “ultra low-voltage energy-efficient Bitcoin mining ASIC,” putting power-guzzling GPUs on notice. If Intel can clinch Bitcoin with “Bonanza Lake,” designing ASICs for other cryptocurrencies is straightforward. With demand from crypto-miners slashed, graphics cards will see a tremendous fall in value, forcing scalpers to cut prices.

Problem solved, richtig? Not quite As we’ve seen with several past spikes in GPU prices, the development of an “energy efficient” ASIC tends to mark the completion of a “difficulty cycle,” where custodians of the cryptocurrency mining algorithm up the “difficulty” (else those with faster hardware simply mine the currency to inflation).

Market saturation of ASICs triggers an increase in difficulty, and the then the next cycle begins, with GPU vendors introducing newer architectures on newer nodes, with generationally doubled SIMD muscle, and significant enough increases to performance/Watt.

The least one can expect from an ASIC deluge is a large cache of new and used current-generation “Ampere” and RDNA2 graphics cards falling into circulation. Scalpers won’t be able to horde brand-new cards, as they’ll be facing stiff competition from miners dumping used cards that people might still be interested in.