Intel could indeed announce that it is entering the cryptocurrency mining market. But there is good news in this story, blue would focus only on Bitcoin and would have absolutely no intention of positioning itself with its future GPUs or chips derived from the Xe architecture.
Intel Bonanza Mine: a solution for Bitcoin mining
The solution that Intel wants to launch is a mining Asic, directly competing with what Bitmain does but operating at very low voltage despite a high level of performance. It is during the IEEE conference dedicated to semiconductors ( from February 19 to 26) that the solution, called Bonanza Mine, would be unveiled. Recall that in 2018 Intel filed a patent describing a processor that claims to be able to conduct “high-performance, energy-efficient bitcoin mining.” This news had already been announced in a way by Raja Korduri, who claimed at the end of the year that “being able to perform much more efficient blockchain validation at a much lower cost with much less power is a fairly easily solvable problem”. While making it clear that this had nothing to do with wanting to use future Intel GPUs to mine: “…it’s not a GPU-related thing, so don’t try to confuse it with a GPU-related thing. GPUs will do graphics, games and all these wonderful things.”
