Recently, Intel announced a new "blockchain accelerator", in fact, we usually say that the mining card, mining machine, specially used for mining bitcoin, small area, high energy efficiency, known as SHA-256 algorithm mining performance of the energy efficiency ratio is more than 1000 times that of mainstream GPU graphics cards.
At the ISSCC 2022 International Solid-State Circuit Conference, Intel announced for the first time many details of its "mining card" Bonanza Mine ASIC, but not the second generation of BMZ2 that was just announced, but the first generation of BMZ1 that had been quietly launched for a long time.
The BMZ1 ASIC chip is very compact, in the FCLGA 132-ball package format, with a length and width of only 7×7.5 mm, and an area of 52.5 mm2.
The core size is only 4.14× 3.42 mm, the area is 14.16 square millimeters, and each 300 mm wafer can cut up to 4000 pieces, so the capacity and utilization rate are very high, which is naturally conducive to maximizing profits.
Strange is the manufacturing process, Intel simply said 7nm, but do not know whether it is the real Intel 7nm before the name change, or the renamed "Intel 7" (10nm ESF), or even TSMC 7nm - the former probability is relatively large.
It integrates 258 mining engines, all of which can execute SHA-256 Hash in parallel, and these parts account for 90% of the entire core area, operating at an ultra-low voltage of only 335mW.
The core frequency is 1.35-1.6GHz (corresponding to temperature 75°C), the average power consumption is 7.5W, and the maximum hash rate is 137GH/s.
Each system (mining machine) is equipped with four motherboards, each motherboard has 75 such chips, a total of 300, a total area of 4248 square millimeters, a total force of 40TH/s, and a total power consumption of 3600W.
It is worth mentioning that Intel also set up a microcontroller chip in the mining machine, which is responsible for managing the boot, thermal voltage monitoring, and supporting switching different modes of high performance, balance and power saving.
In contrast, such energy efficiency is not very prominent in professional mining machines, such as Bitmain's ant miner S19j Pro can do 104TH/s, 3068W, the latest S19j XP is as high as 140TH/s, and the power consumption is slightly reduced to 3010W.
Of course, this is Intel's first generation after all, and the second generation is definitely much higher.
Intel did not disclose how the first generation of BMZ1 chips sold, but it was certainly more successful, which led to the second generation of BMZ2, and has received orders from three large bitcoin mining companies Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square), GRIID Infrasturcture, and even set up a new customer computing division (Custom Compute Group), The Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Business Unit, led by Senior Vice President Raja Koduri.
Official rendering of BMZ2