Intel unveils BonanzaMine, a Bitcoin accelerator ASIC

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/6603/intel-unveils-bonanzamine-a-bitcoin-accelerator-asic/

by rbanffy • 4 years ago

59 129 4 years ago

fuse.wikichip.org

pluc• 4 years ago

Great so can you stop buying all the RTX now so casual gamers can maybe get one?

tyingq• 4 years ago

I don't think anyone's mining bitcoin with GPUs.

enlyth• 4 years ago

It doesn't matter that much, people often use auto-switching algorithms that mine whatever is currently most profitable and then swap it for what they wish to hold. It's not that difficult to mine ETH and get BTC for it (there are services but I don't want to promote anything).

WithinReason• 4 years ago

Etherium is mined most commonly on GPUs, and the mining was designed to optimise badly for ASICs.

rbanffy14• 4 years ago

How long until it moves to proof of stake?

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 4 years ago

Probably not. The era of affordable high-end GPUs is over and I don't think it is coming back even after the entire cryptocurrency-nonsense bubble pops. The expected price of a high-end GPU is now fixed in the >$1k range.

daneel_w3• 4 years ago

"... the BonanzaMines System is shown achieving 55 J/TH whereas the Bitfury Clarke achieves 40 THash/s at 56 J/TH while the Canaan Avalon A9 does 30 TH/s at 58 J/TH."

55 J/TH versus 56 and 58 J/TH from competing vendors. Small margins of course matter at scale, but this (preliminary) improvement in energy efficiency, less than 2%, isn't really impressive. Nor does it seem like an amount that can make a dent in the energy consumption problem of Bitcoin mining. Are they aiming at selling their product cheaper than the competitors' offerings? Doesn't sound like Intel. Am I missing something?

0des• 4 years ago

Indeed, it has a ring of "Hello, fellow youngsters" to it that Intel is even in this space. Maybe AMD and ARM has them thinking they're behind in other areas

wyldfire3• 4 years ago

This product does not even need to be sold in order to boost interest in Intel stock. They can bring it up every quarter and keep the hype going.

DonHopkins3• 4 years ago

I'm surprised that Logitech isn't already shilling Bitcoin Mining Heated Gaming Chairs and Ergonomic Crypto Mice and Mechanical Hashing Keyboards and Bluetooth NFT Whoopee Cushions (every time you sit on it, it mints a fresh NFT for each farting sound it emits, and automatically posts it to your twitter feed).

zardo• 4 years ago

Nor does it seem like an amount that can make a dent in the energy consumption problem of Bitcoin mining.

If you make a dent in the energy consumption problem, doesn't the network automatically adjust to pop the dents out (increase the difficulty)?

wyldfire3• 4 years ago

The hashrate is an input into the difficulty calibration but not the energy consumed. Energy consumption is not an input that could be considered by the network because it's not observed globally (or even locally, really).

EDIT: the equilibrium determining whether and how much capital to invest in hashing equipment is not related to 'difficulty' -- it's a human economic factor that considers difficulty as an input.

dskloet• 4 years ago

Yes it does.

daneel_w3• 4 years ago

It does if miners persistently aim at their maximum power allotment and keep investing in an equal amount of new hardware and extra hashrate. The pivot point where operational costs outweigh the revenue seems to sit just beyond the power allotment for most operations, at least until something radical happens with the power efficiency and costs of mining equipment.

bunnie• 4 years ago

They are also comparing against some older generation ASICs...the S19 from Bitmain[1] which 'mature' tech today gets 34J/TH, 95TH/s which is like... 40% better?? It's a super weird comparison point that they chose. Or maybe I am reading something wrong here...

[1] https://support.bitmain.com/hc/en-us/articles/900000253583-S...

RL_Quine3• 4 years ago

The S19 Pro is down to 29 J/TH system efficiency, not far off beating the Intel design by 50%.

fnord123• 4 years ago

Nor does it seem like an amount that can make a dent in the energy consumption problem of Bitcoin mining.

Jevon's paradox indicates that they will make it much much much much worse.

tapoxi2• 4 years ago

Why sell it at all? They can just mine directly.

daneel_w3• 4 years ago

I believe this is the modus operandi of most manufacturers; selling new models in refurbished condition after a few months of earning revenue on the hardware. Former Swedish Bitcoin miner brand KnC accidentally admitted this, then backtracked and changed their stance to "extensive quality control".

olalonde• 4 years ago

The idea that more efficient mining chips will reduce Bitcoin's energy consumption is just wrong. Miners will just buy and use that new chip for as long as the value of the block reward exceeds the energy cost for mining it.

The mining network should always converge to an equilibrium where X$ worth of electricity is consumed for producing (a little more than) X$ worth of BTC, no matter how efficient mining chips are.

Personally I feel that Bitcoin miners are being unfairly targeted whereas the real issue is unclean energy production. Bitcoin is an easy target because a lot of people believe it is overvalued or worthless which gives rise to arguments such as "Bitcoin mining is unnecessarily wasteful".

mkj• 4 years ago

Such a waste, but the die voltage stacking is interesting. I wonder if GPGPU devices could use the same thing if the cores were sufficiently lockstep.

That allows an input voltage of 8.875 V to be divided into 355 mV across each ganged ASICs group

RL_Quine3• 4 years ago

It's not novel, it's been used since some of the very first mining ASICS. The reason you don't see it anywhere else is that the matching needs to be very good, down to giving chips busy work if they are idle otherwise you get interesting results.

https://i.imgur.com/hAss6mY.jpeg

They are presumably ganging them at each voltage level to try to reduce the candescence.

DonHopkins3• 4 years ago

A lot's changed in the 24 years since "Deep Crack".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

Maybe somebody interested in retro-crypto-computing could write a Deep Crack emulator for modern GPUs! All the specs and sources for the hardware and software are published in the free book "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". I wonder how fast it could run now -- it would be cool to run it in browsers with WebGPU!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19916938

In 1998, the EFF and John Gilmore published the book about "Deep Crack" called "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design". But at the time, it would have been illegal to publish the code on a web site, or include a CDROM with the book publishing the "Deep Crack" DES cracker source code and VHDL in digital form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

https://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/cracked/des/cracking-des....

"We would like to publish this book in the same form, but we can't yet, until our court case succeeds in having this research censorship law overturned. Publishing a paper book's exact same information electronically is seriously illegal in the United States, if it contains cryptographic software. Even communicating it privately to a friend or colleague, who happens to not live in the United States, is considered by the government to be illegal in electronic form."

So to get around the export control laws that prohibited international distribution of DES source code on digital media like CDROMS, but not in written books (thanks to the First Amendment and the Paper Publishing Exception), they developed a system for printing the code and data on paper with checksums, with scripts for scanning, calibrating, validating and correcting the text.

The book had the call to action "Scan this book!" on the cover (undoubtedly a reference to Abby Hoffman's "Steal This book").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steal_This_Book

[...]

aasasd on May 15, 2019 | prev | next [–]

Afaik Phil Zimmermann was one of the first to do it, in '95 through MIT Press—when his PGP circulated a bit too widely for the export regulations. However, the question of him being protected under the 1st wasn't decided in the court.

fguerraz2• 4 years ago

I can't believe we keep on sending tons of CO2 in the atmosphere just to find special numbers...

EvanWinget• 4 years ago

Please spend a few minutes reading more on this topic, as you may change your view after learning where Bitcoin’s electricity usage fits into the broader picture. Some good starting points may be:

https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-americas-most-misund...

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/03/05/the-frustrating...

UweSchmidt• 4 years ago

The articles you cited could do a better job putting the real numbers front and center and present the real, and anticipated (if Bitcoin takes off) ecological impact on the planet. The coindesk article in particular cites really alarming claims about energy usage but doesn't do any real math to disprove it, and only vaguely hints at possible mitigating arguments. Appeals to emotion, citing ideal visions of Satoshi and using "domestic tumble dryers" (newsweek) as comparisons for energy usage further weaken the point these articles should be making.

aaaaaaaaata5• 4 years ago

We talking about sudoku apps?,

Dora the Explorer broadcasts?,

or are you referring to some other waste (y'know, to someone) of electricity/CO²?

tapoxi2• 4 years ago

"All things use electricity!" isn't a great critique of "Bitcoin is an inefficient use of electricity". Bitcoin is designed to be inefficient and get worse over time.

danuker12• 4 years ago

Can you come up with a better solution?

Political ones have failed, since with national currencies we end up with inflation and spending the resources of the future (i.e. debt).

The decision to "suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold" has lasted indefinitely. This means the government can print its own money with no accountability, until it acquires everything and everyone.

Have you looked into proof of stake? It is a pretty good contender, but is vulnerable to Sybil attacks in case of a network partition. With no objective way to tell legitimacy (like "work" that was wasted in proof-of-work), a network partition can not be resolved.

flyinglizard• 4 years ago

Inflation is not necessarily a bug or something you “need to solve”.

ouid3• 4 years ago

I'm not sure you realize how bad deflation is.

escaper• 4 years ago

Good god did someone drink the kool-aid... please explain succinctly what "problem" is being solved by a handful of wealthy individuals using all of the world's GPU power to mine numbers for mostly unusable currency...

qeternity4• 4 years ago

The decision to "suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold" has lasted indefinitely.

Followed by the single most prosperous period in Human history.

This means the government can print its own money with no accountability, until it acquires everything and everyone.

Ah yes, which is why Venezuela and Zimbabwe rule the world.

lottin3• 4 years ago

Political ones have failed

In what sense has the current monetary system failed in your opinion? The gold standard certainly failed, that's why it was abandoned by every single country in the world, but the current monetary system seems to be doing just fine.

JaimeThompson• 4 years ago

Have you looked into proof of stake

PoS is like fusion power in that it will be here soon but unlike fusion power those working PoS don't actually want it to be used it seems to me.

pjc502• 4 years ago

since with national currencies we end up with inflation and spending the resources of the future

One of the important distinctions between Austrians and Keynsians is that the latter have noticed that money isn't a resource. It's a claim on resources.

The resources of the future that we are spending are the real resources: fuel, clean water, energy, crops, minerals, human effort, the natural environment, and the biosphere services themselves.

You can print money, but you can't print oil. If you print money faster than you exploit real resources, then yes you get inflation. However, the converse is not true. The ultimate demand of anti-inflationists is that your salary remain $X - forever, the cost of a car remains $Y - forever, and the cost of a loaf of bread remains $Z - forever. You can't achieve price stability with technological hacks.

The reason why bitcoinism is so offensive to many people is the way it takes real resources - in this case silicon wafers - and turns them into nothing but money. It's a prayer wheel to Mammon, like Arthur C Clarke's Nine Billion Names Of God.

simion314• 4 years ago

Political ones have failed, since with national currencies we end up with inflation and spending the resources of the future (i.e. debt).

I never touched crypto so I am I wrong that it's value is even more unpredictable then putting money in the bank? Like I can buy something now and tomorrow some news about a hack or some internet drama and I just lost everything. As a dude that is not into economy theory my conclusion is that crypto would have negligible value if it wasn't used to speculate it will grow or used in illegal stuff, I won't be surprised if behind all of it is a group of obscenely rich and greedy individuals

Bitcoin is like owning some cool trading cards, they are valuable now, they might be more valuable tomorrow and some internet drama about the show/authors will make it's value negative day after tomorrow.

fguerraz2• 4 years ago

Can you come up with a better solution?

Yes!!!! It's called central banks and monetary policies. Seriously. We need to get back our democratic control over it, and make it work for us again. We have to stop wanting to fix our societal issues with technology: we can't fix our money with crypto-currency any more than we can't fix mass surveillance with encryption.

If anything, crypto currencies are a concentration of what is worse with our existing financial system: even less democratic control, no regulations and therefore all sorts of scams, and we can't tune it to make our economy work.

In a world ruled by crypto, our governments would have the perfect alibi for failing: it's not their fault, their hands are tied, they can't get the money for the projects that are needed. This has happened plenty of times in the past when we were using gold and such. And that's just the credit crunch problem, there are many more.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately I find it very easy to believe, just exceptionally disappointing.

rbanffy14• 4 years ago

You can use these as electric heaters. Since there is no mechanical work, all energy input is radiated as heat. In this scenario, capex aside, the hashes come out for free and can offset a little of the electricity bill. If they can be encased in passive radiators and run at 60+ Celsius, that'd be awesome for a home boiler. Lower temperatures would be really nice for keeping heated pools hot.

gaze3• 4 years ago

This is the only justification for mining I’ve ever been able to come up with.

jlokier3• 4 years ago

It's actually very inefficient use of energy to use miners as electric heaters.

Now that we care about energy efficiency and atmospheric pollution, hopefully more people will learn that efficient electric heating takes the form of a heat pump, where you end up with more heat energy in your space than just the electricity put into the device.

A miner cannot match the heating efficiency of a heat pump because it dissipates the negative-entropy into computation instead of pumping.

TYPE_FASTER• 4 years ago

With all the discussion around UBI, housing shortages, and crypto, I think it would be interesting to build tiny houses with solar arrays that would be funded and heated by the crypto miners running in them.

jacquesm3• 4 years ago

I would take any claims of improvement with a grain of salt until independent verification has been done. This is Intel we're talking about, they have a very long history of overpromising and underperforming when it comes to power/compute efficiency.

RL_Quine3• 4 years ago

What's described here is deeply noncompetitive, even if it was released today. From the pictures of the PCBs in that article I suspect it is the combination of both being incredibly expensive to produce and miserably inefficient.

rbanffy14• 4 years ago

I wonder whether it'd be effective to build a boiler lined with these so, while you help to launder money you'll, at least, get some hot water.

jacquesm3• 4 years ago

Co-generation :) I'm sure it's been done.

zouhair• 4 years ago

Humans are so smart and so deeply dumb.

varispeed• 4 years ago

Bitcoin is quite unsafe. For example if you send money to a cause you care about, but government disagrees with it, they can disallowlist your wallet and you probably won't be able to touch any coins derived from it ever. If Intel was serious, they should have looked into supporting Monero or other truly anonymous currencies.

aaaaaaaaata5• 4 years ago

If you use one wallet for all your transactions, you're the fool.

You don't carry your checking account in your back pocket,

why would you give a small charitable fund (or anyone!) knowledge of how much you have, and where?

kllrnohj• 4 years ago

Using multiple wallets is just minor obfuscation, not protection. The funds came from somewhere and that somewhere is also knowable & observable.

Especially with transaction fees being what they are, shuffling money between wallets is just wasting money. And a lot of it.

wyldfire3• 4 years ago

Thankfully -- for now -- most merchants do not seem to respect any such blacklist/greylist. However, for exchanges, KYC regulation may end up having some similar effects.

Intel's no dummies. They know that a lot of investors have heard of Bitcoin and not a lot of investors have heard of monero. They didn't get into this business because they wanted to contribute to a decentralized currency. They just want to make money.

AnonHP• 4 years ago

Considering that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies intend(ed) to operate in a decentralized manner, your point probably matters only for those who want to deal with centralized exchanges that follow such allow or deny lists. There are services and ways to connect with others to trade (though they may come with some more difficulty compared to a centralized exchange).

rbanffy14• 4 years ago

Isn't this why you have multiple wallets?

tromp• 4 years ago

Bitmain announced the S19XP [1] coming out in the 2nd half of this year with an efficiency of 21.5 J/TH, so Intel still has a lot of catching up to do.

Another news report [2] mentions

After news of the company's efforts came to light, Intel finally officially acknowledged its blockchain/Bitcoin silicon program, divulging that it already has several large customers for the second-gen chips. That includes BLOCK (helmed by CEO Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame), Argo Blockchain, and GRIID Infrastructure.
Intel hasn't shared details of the second-gen chips and systems yet, but we do know they are derivatives of the BMZ1 ASICs shown below.

but I'd be surprised if this second generation has bridged the nearly 2.5x efficiency gap...

[1] https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021120711304...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-details-its-bitcoin-...

Zenst• 4 years ago

Even if this is not cutting egde, it will sell and more so with all those small ASIC chips upon their top node, will help fill out the wafers to allow the unused jaggy edges to be filled with these smaller dies in production.

Now, even without that possibility, Intel is ramping up its fabrication and offerings and if they can maintain that momentum outside their core buisness as they seem to be going, then the more products they can keep the fabs busy and turn some profit is good. Even if they broke even upon this, they would still have this and other avenues to pad out production runs and their lab running costs.

Depending upon how this goes, may see this fused into some GPU offering down the line for that market, certainly they have the ability to do that if the demand is there and also help open up there GPU plans more.

So on the face of it, sure it's another option for crypo miners, but deeper, it too me seems like Intel leveridging some low hanging fruit to give there fab offerings more momentum and shifting towards competing with the TSMC's being an end goal perhaps, certainly lots of catchup. Though the aspect of production wafers and having lots of smaller chips you can pad out a wafer, sure does seem like a capital move and be interesting if they go down that path. For me, it seems like mixed wafer production using smaller dies to flesh out the unused space left by larger dies upon a round wafer as a great way to reduce waste and turn that into profit.

cs7022• 4 years ago

Huh.

Here we have the largest, most important chipmaker in the US making and selling chips specifically for Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining"). I was not expecting to see something like this, from a company like Intel, anytime soon.

This sort of thing makes me think Bitcoin is on track to become a permanent component of the world's financial infrastructure, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about it, because any efforts to outlaw it or regulate it out of existence will now hurt, not just tiny startups and offshore operators, but also leading companies like Intel, which is of strategic importance to the US.

Most politicians in the US will be very reluctant to mess with a fast-growing, potentially large market for US technology products and financial services.

danuker12• 4 years ago

I was not expecting to see something like this

On one hand, it shows Intel believes mining is here to stay.

On the other hand, I suspect it makes up a very small part of their business, and any regulation won't hurt much.

cs7022• 4 years ago

Think of it this way: Intel just validated the market for every Fortune 500 corporation.

belltaco• 4 years ago

Bitcoin transaction processing (AKA "mining")

Unfortunately, mining isn't scaled with processing transactions.

Bitcoin has a hard cap of 7 transactions per second, regardless of whether 5 miners are running or 5 million.

The amount of resources that are put into mining scale with the price of BTC, not transactions.

Also Nvidia has made mining-only silicon for several years now. So Intel isn't the first major company doing it.

Intel unveils BonanzaMine, a Bitcoin accelerator ASIC

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