02 Dec 2018 Simon Briggs
Intel Enhances Bitcoin Mining with New Patent
On the 25th of November, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the organization a patent illustrating a processor which possesses the capacity to lead "cost-effective Bitcoin mining," explicitly naming the SHA-256 calculation algorithm, utilized by the world's biggest digital currency by market capitalization.
Intel’s latest development enhances the efficiency of the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) mining further. Intel states that mining nowadays is done in stages, which reduces the effectiveness of a chip and Intel’s new ASIC chip would process 32-bit nonces at once.
As the patent clarifies:
"Dedicated Bitcoin mining ASIC rigs are designed to execute various SHA-256 engines that may perform with a rate of thousands of hashes for every second while consuming more than 200 watts of electrical power. Intel’s chip would be hardwired to certain parameters in Bitcoin mining calculations to make a single core calculate transaction-specific data."
The patent describes how the chip would be hard-wired to transaction-specific mining procedures into a segment of the processor to lessen the time, energy, and excess processes required to confirm an exchange and mine a block.
Designing such chips would bring down the number of calculations required, Intel describes in the patent papers, marking that such a framework would reduce the energy needed for a chip to process transaction data by 15 percent.
The patent additionally implies that changing the amount of the 32-bit nonce compared to legitimacy could additionally bring down power needs.
Energy consumption and cost are two of the most challenging obstacles that digital currency miners are facing right now. In November, the Japanese web giant, GMO, announced its mining business had posted a $5.5 million loss in Q3 of 2018.
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