Tuesday, January 18th 2022
Intel "Bonanza Mine" is a Bitcoin Mining ASIC, Intel Finally Sees Where the Money is
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, codenamed "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 Conference. 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, right? 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.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
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 Conference. 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.
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.
40 Comments on Intel "Bonanza Mine" is a Bitcoin Mining ASIC, Intel Finally Sees Where the Money is
Unless someone decides to resurect ETC, but afaik, that project is as good as dead, and obviously can't compete with ETH 2.0
15% cut, that means that after paying for Norton and then paying for Electricity, you get nothing. Norton make more than you do because you've paid them for the privilege of using their software and then you mine for them and they don't have any hardware costs or energy costs.
Most miners and pools take a 1% cut. 15% is daylight robbery, but Norton are unethical crooks exploiting the stupid anyway, so what's new?! :)
My electricity is $0.28/KWh and I'm almost exactly at 200% profit (ie, electricity is 1/3rd my mining revenue)
LTT looked at it in today's video and not only do they take a 15% cut, the hashrate is down by about 15-20% over nicehash (which isn't the best miner either!) and their power draw was up almost 60%. It's LTT so take those numbers with a pinch of salt, but what they're showing looks reasonable even if it's not perfect.
Whattomine.com says that my 1.4GH/s farm would make just $8 a day profit at the increased power draw and reduced hashrate with 15% profits eaten by Norton. I'm actually making $41 a day (an all-time low, actually; Crypto values have taken a pounding in the last month or two.
But it will put the final nail in the dream of crypto freeing us from... anything.
The western world is betting on crypto the same way the east, mainly asia and russia, are betting on gold. Will be interesting to see hwo it plays out.Crypto promised us a release fromt he constraints of the old ways of doing business, but it couldnt free us from the oldest of human vices: greedPeople have a serious hard on for hating crypto because either it is screwing the market for their own purchases (which I get, being stuck on a 480 stuck arse) or out of this misaligned hatred for anything that tries to buck the established systems of the world. A LOT of people get bent out of shape when they see some people making a mint outside of the taxable normal people jobs and investments, for some reason, isntead of trying to hop on the train and make some money for themselves. A lot of that I fell is down to fear being a primary response to the unknown or the misundetstood, and crypto is really complicated comapred to traditional financial systems.
I as an individual can't stop cryptocurrency from gaining market traction, and it's screwing over my GPU pricing just as much as it is for everyone else here.
My attitude was "if you can't beat them, join them".
Whining about crypto isn't going to fix anything. You can either let it ruin you, or you can use it to gain an advantage.
Heavy sigh.