Last updated February, 2022
On February 11, Intel’s senior vice president, Raja M. Koduri, announced that Intel is “declaring our intent to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies.” It’s exciting, and yet completely confusing at the same time.
More specifically, Intel has a “roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators.” They want to promote and engage an open and secure blockchain ecosystem to help advance the crypto-space in a responsible and ‘sustainable’ way.
Their blockchain accelerator will ship later this year (2022). Intel already has corporate clients including Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square), and GRIID Infrastructure.
Intel is expecting their circuit innovations to deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining.
Argo is a mining company, and the other 2 also dabble in crypto mining. However, they use the term ‘GPU’ and then talk about SHA-256 mining. SHA-256 mining we can only assume refers to bitcoin mining, and that hasn’t been done with GPUs for a long time – they just don’t compete with the ASICs being developed by other countries.
Is Intel purposefully confusing details? Do they mean they will now have something 1000 times better than the best mining gpus? Or are they saying that their chips will be 1000x better than a GPU at mining bitcoin (not very good), which likely puts it at the level of other ASICs already available.
This announcement could make Intel a compelling investment for a broader crypto-market investment.