Today Intel announced that they would be discontinuing production of their Blockscale 1000 series of ASICs built for cryptocurrency mining. Blockscale was designed by the Custom Compute Group within what was Intel's AXG graphics division at the time, and launched to market back in April 2022 when the value of Bitcoin was still above $40K USD. Blockscale initially succeeded with efficiency and supply advantages over competing ASICs as Intel leveraged their manufacturing capacity to produce the chips, however the valuation of the crypto currency market experienced a major slump over the second half of 2022. Intel's AXG has also recently seen a major restructuring, though there have been no mentions of what the operable status is of the Custom Compute Group. Support for existing Blockscale customers is set to continue for some time. Intel has not announced any possible follow-up crypto ASIC generation, only saying, "We continue to monitor market opportunities."

Intel's Blockscale was rather late to the market as far as crypto mining ASICs go. Early mining ASICs began hitting the scene in mid-2012 as FPGAs started to reach their limits in efficiency, and investment funds began to funnel into crypto startups. Intel's interest in cryptocurrency hardware lagged behind even their contemporaries at NVIDIA and AMD, both of which had crypto-focused variants of consumer GPUs on the market as early as 2017 during the first major mining-induced hardware shortages. Intel hasn't mentioned whether the timing of Blockscale contributed to its short shelf life, but Bitcoin is on its way back up after the recent slump, shooting up to around $30K USD just prior to Intel's announcement.

Intel today announced details for its new Intel Blockscale ASIC. Building on years of Intel research and development (R&D), this application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) will provide customers with energy-efficient hashing for proof-of-work consensus networks. Compute requirement for blockchains utilizing proof-of-work consensus mechanisms is growing at a rapid rate due to their resiliency and ability to scale without sacrificing decentralization. This growing pool of computing power requires an enormous amount of energy, necessitating new computing technologies that can provide the requisite power in a more energy-efficient manner while also being durable enough to mitigate long-term e-waste concerns.

"Momentum around blockchain continues to build. It is the enabler of decentralized and distributed computing, making way for innovative business models. To power this new era of computing, Intel is delivering solutions that can offer an optimal balance of hashing throughput and energy efficiency regardless of a customer's operating environment. Intel's decades of R&D in cryptography, hashing techniques and ultra-low voltage circuits make it possible for blockchain applications to scale their computing power without compromising on sustainability," said Balaji Kanigicherla, Intel vice president and general manager of Custom Compute in the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group.