Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator with Optimized Message Datapath

http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20180089642.PGNR.&OS=dn%2F20180089642&RS=DN%2F20180089642

by based2 • 8 years ago

112 48 8 years ago

appft.uspto.gov

based2• 8 years ago

src: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intel-beantragt-Pate...

sb1752• 8 years ago

Interesting this was filed in September 2016

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg2• 8 years ago

They filed ~2 years too late as far as I can tell.

sdhgaiojfsa• 8 years ago

I'd guess not? They seem to have patented a particular approach to doing this on-chip, which may or may not have prior art.

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 8 years ago

Isn't it first-to-file now?

shemnon42• 8 years ago

(a) it is first /inventor/ to file. You cannot patent stuff you (for various values of you) didn't invent. (b) it is still subject to prior art disclosures.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg2• 8 years ago

If this is actually enforced my money would be on a hardfork changing to a PoW.

cornholio• 8 years ago

Tried to read the claims and realized again that patents are unreadable to an engineer and completely useless for any useful advancement of the field.

Clearly, somebody was working on a mining chip design and took advantage of the patent incentives these companies offer employees to build a warchest. The lawyers then took the description they provided and turned into this steaming pile of technolegal jargon.

ShaneCurran• 8 years ago

I wouldn’t read too much into this. Intel have very generous employee “patent creation” bonuses that encourage them to constantly file patents, ca. $2500 per patent IIRC.

That being said, it’s still interesting seeing Intel encouraging and embracing crypto ASIC design.

stagger87• 8 years ago

"Generous"

vernie• 8 years ago

Is that incentive per application or per grant?

sweden• 8 years ago

Usually it's per grant. It's quite common for big companies like Intel to give bonuses to the employees for filling patents.

The attitude of these companies is to incentivize employees to patent whatever they come up with, whether they intend to use the idea or not.

pkaye2• 8 years ago

I've seen a split approach like 50% at disclosure and 50% at grant because the employer wants to see you follow through in assisting with the paperwork. Quite a few never reach grant stage or take so long that you may have even moved to a new employer.

ggg9990• 8 years ago

It differs by company, but is not that easily gameable. (I’ve tried many times and succeeded only once in filing an application that was completely trash). The company’s patent lawyers ultimately decide what they will and won’t file, and they are more time constrained than budget constrained).

Rebelgecko2• 8 years ago

Is that just a flat $2500, no profit/royalty sharing? Seems like a good way to get people to churn out lots of low quality patents.

I like the scheme where I work--there's a relatively small cash bonus (a few hundred bucks), but the inventors get a nice chunk of any income from the patent. Another slice goes to the inventor's department's budget, so they can indirectly benefit there too.

pkaye2• 8 years ago

How does that work? You may have an idea but the actual development may involve 100s of people and the patent might involve a small aspect of the product. How do assign a value to the patent?

Also you are right that this system results in lots of low quality patents. I used to see at one employer chip designers cranking out 5-6 cell designs on a quarterly basis making an $10k extra a quarter. Maybe 1% of those would actually be implemented but it is worth it for the company to get every potential solution either as prior art or patented.

psyc• 8 years ago

When I was at Microsoft, it was $1000 and a trophy called a 'Patent Cube". I knew a couple of people who had a profitable sideline of manically brainstorming bullshit patents together, for every little thing they worked on. They had stacks of these trophies in their offices.

jacquesm3• 8 years ago

As usual the patent gets awarded to the party that doesn't have a product or even a proof of concept while the market has already moved on and has been selling the product for years.

monochromatic2• 8 years ago

As usual

Is that what usually happens? Really?

jacquesm3• 8 years ago

Most patents that I come across read as landgrabs, not as companies that actually have working prototypes, proofs of concept or any plans to produce those.

The patent system is seriously broken.

pwg• 8 years ago

Title change required.

Look at the linked page, it says: "United States Patent Application".

The linked doc is an "application". It is not yet a patent. It very likely has not even been looked at from a patent-ability standpoint.

sctb• 8 years ago

Thanks, we've updated the title from “Intel patents Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator”.

thecompilr• 8 years ago

Intel encourages employees to file all sorts of crappy patents, but I don't see it as a bad or evil practice, but rather as a defensive strategy. Meaning that they don't really enforce patent usage on others, instead they need to have a trove of own patents as defense against patent trolls.

dec0dedab0de• 8 years ago

Except if they go out of business at some point, and all those patents end up in the hands of trolls.

Viper007Bond• 8 years ago

I don't see Intel going out of business any time soon...

john_moscow• 8 years ago

Much likely they would get acquired by another BigCo specifically for patents, trademarks, etc.

gruez3• 8 years ago

instead they need to have a trove of own patents as defense against patent trolls

but the whole point of patent trolling is that you're suing via a non-practicing entity, which a shell company that does nothing but hold patents, so there's nothing to sue back at.

utopcell• 8 years ago

Most likely it doesn't help against trolls but strengthens their position in cross-licensing negotiations with other companies. When a company's portfolio includes many thousands of patents, due diligence to discover the important ones becomes impossible and it's then a numbers game.

fipple• 8 years ago

Kind of pointless since all Bitcoin hardware is made by Chinese companies who don’t give two shits about patents.

gruez3• 8 years ago

bitmain certainly cares enough about asicboost to oppose a bitcoin extension that would break asicboost (segwit).

wslh• 8 years ago

AsicBoost can be potentially used by anyone since it is now a defensive patent. Bitmain cares about this patent because they need to disclose all other patents they have if they want to use AsicBoost: "There Is a Bitcoin Patent War Going On, but This Initiative Could End It" [1]

[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/there-bitcoin-patent-wa...

stale2002• 8 years ago

Segwit did not break covert asicboost. The math proved that wrong, and that one could make very small, inexpensive changes to have it continue working with segwit.

This was admitted by Greg Maxwell in the dev mailing lists, when they proposed an asicboost blocker only change, that they rescinded because they realized that it and segwit never actually stopped covert asicboost.

It was also confirmed by experts like chjj (CTO of purse.io, and Bitcoin developer) that segwit never blocked covert asicboost.

mrb2• 8 years ago

Stop spreading this conspiracy theory stuff (which is very popular on /r/Bitcoin)

Bitmain's own pools—AntPool and BTC.com—were voting for (not against) Segwit through nVersion flags in July 2017

Although Bitmain have had criticism about segwit, they are overall «publicly on record as historically supporting it» source: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-sme...

They signed this pro-segwit letter: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

Taek• 8 years ago

The narrative (whether correct or incorrect) is that Bitmain tried to block an extension because it would disable a feature in their hardware that was saving them tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per year on electricity.

That has nothing to do with patents, it's (supposedly) an advantage they had over the competition, of course they are going to defend that advantage.

Patents for mining hardware though are unenforceable overall. The problem is that lots of private mining farms exist, and nothing is stopping one from developing a chip that is in violation of many patents, but then never releasing the hardware publicly. There would be no way to tell that the patent is being violated, especially because mining is more or less anonymous in the first place.

makomk2• 8 years ago

Some complicated pipelining optimization that claims to reduce the critical path of each pipeline stage, increasing the clock speed and/or decreasing the required voltage for a given clock speed, written in impenetrable patentese.

The easiest pipeline optimisation, which is basically free hardware-wise and is documented in the academic literature for years, is to move the computation of W + K + H to the previous pipeline stage, reducing the critical path. This is a trivial win because all the data is available already and H can be discarded afterwards, which also has the nice bonus of mapping more efficiently to certain FPGA hardware. It sounds like Intel have taken this and expanded on it to move even more things into earlier and later stages of the pipeline.

Or, as Intel puts it, "The precomputed (H.sub.i+K.sub.i+W.sub.i) may be stored in the 32-bit register 402 dedicated for H.sub.i. This optimization reduces the critical path for the computation of E.sub.i+1 by one CSA or approximately three logic gates." I implemented this back in 2011 in some open source FPGA mining code, and it was an old trick even back then. They don't seem to be citing any prior art, which is a bit dubious.

DoctorOetker• 8 years ago

I take it you understand the specific optimization.

Is there a reason they keep talking about a '32-bit' this and that? or should that be '32 byte' as that would be 256 bits?

makomk2• 8 years ago

SHA-256 operates almost entirely on 32-bit values, because it's designed to be efficient to compute on general-purpose CPUs without special hardware support. The SHA-256 state consists of 8 32-bit integers, of which 2 are updated each round. (SHA-512 uses 64-bit integers instead for some reason.)

Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator with Optimized Message Datapath

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