Intel BMZ1 Bonanza Mine Announced At ISSCC: Intel's First Crypto Mining Computer Is Here

Just a few days back Intel shared updates on its first custom chip for crypto mining. The company has now shared more details on the same at ISSCC 2022. The very first crypto mining chip from Intel is known as BMZ1 or Bonanza Mine Accelerator chip, and the chip-maker is already taking orders for the same.

The Intel BMZ1 Bonanza Mine is not meant for retail customers, as the custom computing RIG with 300 BMZ1 chip comes with a TDP of a whopping 3,600-watt. The chip is designed for specific tasks, in this case, it is designed for crypto mining. The term BMZ stands for Bonanza Mine ASIC, tailormade for crypto mining using SHA-256 hash algorithm.

When compared to mining a cryptocurrency on a regular GPU, the Intel BMZ1 rig is said to be 1000 percent more power-efficient. In fact, a single Intel BMZ1 rig that contains over 300 BMZ1 chips is said to be capable of offering 40 tera hashes per second (TH/s) mining performance.

In terms of technology, the Intel BMZ1 is fabbed using the 7 nanometers (nm) process and has a die size of 7 x 7.5mm exposed-die FCLGA package. A single-chip measures 4.14 x 3.42mm, where the smaller chip size is said to improve the chip yield percentage, where, a single wafer can have up to 400 chips.

Although this looks like a power-efficient mining RIG, there are still far more powerful mining RIGs from Hydro Bitcoin Miner. The Antminer S19 Pro+ from Hydro Bitcoin Miner claims to offer 198 tera hash per second (TH/s) while consuming 5445W of power.

Although the Intel BMZ1 is pretty new in the market, the company is also said to be working on the Intel BMZ2, which is said to be more power-efficient and might deliver better performance-per-watt when compared to the Intel BMZ1. The Bonanza Mine ASIC 2 might launch by the end of this year or early next year.

Pricing And Availability

As of now, there is no information on the pricing of the Intel BMZ1 blockchain mining accelerator. However, Intel has already received several orders from professional crypto mining institutes like Argo Blockchain. With this generation of blockchain mining chips, Intel aims to make this a more energy-efficient process.