Analyst Christopher Rolland revealed that Bitland has developed an ASIC chip for excavating Ethereum, which is planned to be shipped in the second quarter of this year. Although Bitland is likely to be the largest ASIC supplier, it is very likely that The first such product was introduced in the market, but it is understood that at least three other companies are studying the ASIC's ASIC, which are currently in development.
The report pointed out that Bitcoin's ASIC chip developed by Bitland has far better mining performance than GPU. ASIC has already become the mainstream of bitcoin mining. Before that, there is no exclusive ASIC chip for Ethereum, and miners can only use GPU mining. , Ether mining boom, AMD, Nvidia's GPU selling, the market is in short supply, the price is rushed, it is estimated that mining accounts for 20% of AMD's revenue, Nvidia's 10%. But good days may be coming to an end, Bit China’s R&D of the Ethercoin-specific mining chip will start selling, and its performance will surpass that of the GPU. It will take away a large number of orders. Christopher Rolland expects that GPU buying will suffer.
The user previously used Ethereum to mine through the GPU, but their GPUs will not be used for games and image processing. Previously, Bitland, Kenan, and other companies' ASIC mining equipment made Bitcoin concentrated in the hands of a few people. The industry is concerned that the ASIC chips for the Ethereum mining machine are now born. It may be that the Ethernet coins will be concentrated in the hands of giants like Bitcoin.
Christopher Rolland added that in the GPU mining, Ethereum is arguably a profitable cryptocurrency. It will affect a large number of markets. But before understanding the specific performance of the Bitland device, it is difficult to assert whether it is The ability to phase out existing GPUs. It is worth noting that if there is only one ASIC maker of Ethereum, that situation is somewhat unpleasant. Fortunately, companies such as Samsung will soon join the market.
In fact, the Micronet was reported in February. In order to diversify the company’s dependence on Bitcoin's mining business, Bitland has already focused on many areas, such as artificial intelligence, Ether mining machines and chips. It is understood that Ethernet The ETHASH algorithm used in the coin was originally designed for a large band width of the memory, which is the demand for the graphics chip. Therefore, it is suitable for PC mining. The mining machine is not good at this. However, because Ethan's may use the PoS proof of stack model after 2019. When the current mining machine will be more difficult to implement, Bit Continental will start designing a new type of mining machine to meet this demand. Market demand.
Bitland’s upcoming launch of the E3 mining model F3 is designed to increase the front-side bus bandwidth of the DRAM and increase the size of the memory. In the future, each of the mining machines will have 3 mainboards. There are 6 mining dedicated ASIC processors, and each mining-specific ASIC processor is equipped with 32 1Gb DDR3 memories. In total, there will be 72 GigaByte DRAM memory on an F3 excavator. The current S9 mining machine for Bitcoin has only 512MB of DDR3 memory, which is very different in memory size.
Industry experts pointed out that the ASIC Ether mining machine has a large memory requirement, and it is not competitive with the conventional DDR4. Several manufacturers are taking new paths and trying new media and interfaces in the memory area. Currently the highest efficiency of the Ether coins is still For AMD graphics cards, if you want to use an ASIC to make an Ether mining machine, you need a large-channel, high-speed memory interface and the best technology. There was also a vendor project that wanted to use DDR4, but the price was high, and ETH said that it would be POS. The project stopped. To sum up, the ASIC chip of the Ether Optician compared with other ASICs of the other currencies, mainly the memory authorization and process technology, there are challenges. There is nothing difficult to overcome in other aspects.
The market predicts that because of the small energy consumption and high efficiency of the F3, after the official launch of the F3 in the future, it will impact the existing PC mining market with graphics chips. Also because of the optimistic view of such markets, the Bitcoin has frequently visited the Taiwan meeting storage. The factory, to discuss whether it can provide relevant memory capacity. It is understood that the demand for this part of the Bit Continental is about 3,000 pieces of 12-inch wafer per month. In this part, the memory factories in Taiwan are still trying hard to squeeze out the production capacity. supply.
Since F3 will have more memory and lower energy consumption in the market, it will also bring more business opportunities to leading foundry TSMC and related memory manufacturers. The currency circle pointed out that the ETHASH algorithm is heavily dependent on Ram bandwidth algorithm, ASIC is not cost-effective, save only the cost of GPU, but to be memory maker Samsung Micron Hynix and other harvest a wave.
In terms of ASIC chip foundry, the recent supply chain reported that Nanke Fab 14, an original 16-nanometer mining ASIC manufactured by Bitstar, has been upgraded to 12nm and has been packaged by MediaTek, NVIDIA and other customers. The Bitcoin 16-nm Bitcoin ASIC order was moved to the TSMC Nanjing plant. The Nanjing plant has entered the mass production phase. The first batch of wafers will be shipped in May at the fastest time. Equipped with its own design of the Ethercoin mining ASIC, recently TSMC will also launch at 28nm. To this end, BitContinent has packaged TSMC's Nanjing plant with about 20,000 16nm per month capacity. The wafers will be shipped after May.