Bitmain, the China-based cryptomining firm, recently released a teaser of its upcoming machine,the Antminer E9. The miner marks the first ASIC miner from the company in a while and is made to specifically mine Ethereum.
As to how powerful the Antminer E9 is, the miner reportedly has an Ethereum hashrate of 3GH/s, which is about the same as 32 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards mining in unison. For comparison sake and as Tom’s Hardware puts it, that’s even faster than the LinzhiPhoenix Ethash ASIC miner, which has a hashrate of just 2.6GH/s.
What’s seemingly more impressive is the E9’s power draw of 2556W and its supposed power efficiency of 0.85J/M. Again, compared to the Phoenix miner, the E9 consumes approximately 15% less power.
As for the price of it, Bitmain hasn’t released the official pricing for the E9, but suffice to say, the machine is clearly going to cost a pretty penny. In fact, speculations suggest that the ASIC miner could cost as much as US$30000 (~RM122940), which is still cheaper than actually buying 32 RTX 3080.
Bitmain’s teaser will most certainly please several gamers, as it could divert the attention of cryptominers away from an already starving consumer GPU market. On the other hand, the existence of the E9 might just ruffle some feathers over at NVIDIA, especially since the GPU brand very recently rolled out its CMP lineup.
At the time of writing, Bitmain did not specify any release date.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
