Intel, like any other major chipmaker and player in the industry at this point, is seeking to enter the cryptocurrency market. To that end, the company has supposedly begun work and development on a cryptomining-specific processor, codenamed “Bonanza Mine”.
The discovery of Intel’s cryptomining processor was first discovered in a schedule for a live Q&A, set to take place during the 2022 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). There still isn’t a whole lot of detail regarding the processor but at the very least, the theme of the Q&A tells us that it is set to be an ultra-low-voltage “Bitcoin Mining ASIC”. On a side note, this discovery also comes after Raja Koduri, the senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group at Intel, confirmed during a livestream that his company was working on a blockchain solution. And that it wasn’t on the GPU side.
What is also interesting is Intel’s timing with the Q&A: as you may know, the company is expected to announce its long-awaited ARC Alchemist GPUs during the first half of this year, although the exact launch date remains a mystery. This “leaked” detail may suggest that, while Intel wants to have a foot in the cryptocurrency door, it may not necessarily want to do at the risk of having its future GPUs hoarded and bought en masse by miners, thus finding itself in a situation similar to what its rivals, NVIDIA and AMD, are currently in.
In any case, we’ll just have to wait until after 23 February to learn more.
(Source: Hot Hardware, TPU)
