After announcing its plans to enter the crypto-mining market with its first blockchain chipset earlier this month, Intel has now announced its first Bitcoin mining chip during the ongoing International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2022 event. The chipset, dubbed the Bonanza Mine BMZ1 ASIC, is the first generation SoC under the “blockchain accelerator” line. Along with this, the company announced a Bonanza Mine System, powered by the Bonanza Mine chipsets, as well.
The Intel Bonanza Mine BMZ1 ASIC SoC is a 7nm chipset and can deliver up to 137 Giga HASHes/ second (GH/s) while consuming 7.5W of power. Although Intel claims its blockchain accelerators can allow for power-efficient mining operations, the BMZ1 chipset faces tough competition from other market leaders like MicroBT and Bitmain.
Intel also said that the second-generation Bonanza Mine BMZ2 ASIC chipset is also ready for shipping, which can reportedly deliver 40.4 GH/s of mining performance. In fact, the company says that it has already started shipping the BMZ2 chipsets to clients like GRIID Infrastructure and Jack Dorsey’s Block, previously known as Square. The second-gen BMZ2-based Bonanza Mine System will be available in the market later this year and will offer better performance than the current BMZ1-based Bonanza Mine System.
