Intel revealed its second-generation BTC mining setup during
the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2022, a
conference dedicated to the electronics and chip manufacturing industry.
We first discovered Intel's Bonanza Mine ASICs in a listing
for a presentation at the ISSCC 2022 conference, and the information below
comes from the presentations at the event. This material covers the first
generation of Intel's mining chips, known as BMZ1, but the company has already
moved on to its second-gen 'Bonanza Mine' ASIC, known as BMZ2, that it is now
making available to customers to challenge the likes of Bitmain and MicroBT.
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.
Each chip die measures 4.14 x 3.42mm, for a total of
14.16mm^2 of silicon, so these are comparatively small slivers of silicon. The
smaller die size improves yield and maximizes wafer area usage (up to 4,000 die
per wafer), thus helping maximize production capacity (though it does require
more wafer dicing/packaging capacity). Intel says these are 7nm ASICs, but
doesn't specify if that is its own 'Intel 7,' the original 7nm before it
renamed the process node to 'Intel 4,' or TSMC's 7nm process.
Each Bonanza Mine ASIC has 258 mining engines, and each
engine computes parallel SHA256 double hashes. These engines comprise 90% of
the die area and operate at what Intel characterizes as an 'ultra-low' voltage
of 355mV.
Each ASIC operates at 1.35 to 1.6 GHz at 75C, consuming an
average of 7.5W apiece while hitting up to 137 Ghash/s. That works out to 55
J/THash/s at 355mV.
Zooming out to the 300 chips in the system, there's a total
of 4,248mm^2 of silicon that delivers up to 40TH/s at 3600W of power
consumption. It's clear that Intel will need to be far more competitive against
Bitmain and MicroBT's existing miners. For instance, Bitmain's Antmienr S19j
Pro 104T does 104 THash/s at 3,068W, while the newest model, the S19j XP, does
140 THash/s at 3010W. Again, these are Intel's first-gen Bonanza Mine chips,
but its new contracts are for the second-gen models that remain shrouded in
mystery.
The control unit sits atop the device, housing an
Intel-FPGA-based system controller and an Arm Cortex core that runs the mining
daemon and distributes the work among the 300 chips. The ARM core also adjusts
the on-die PLLs to control chip frequencies and verify the ASICs' hash results.
As you would expect, the unit also has an Ethernet connection to communicate
with a larger mining pool. The system also has a programmable power supply.
As shown above, the system can operate in different power/thermal
profiles, like Power-Saving, Balanced, and High-Performance, to tailor the
usage profile, thus yielding anywhere from 54 to 60 J/THash.
Intel built the system described above from the first-gen
Bonanza Mine chips. However, Intel's second-gen chips can obviously be used in
several configurations: GRIID's supply agreement with Intel has plenty of
redactions to protect sensitive information, but it also heavily references
Intel's Reference Design Materials. These are a series of documents that customers
use as guidance when integrating the Bonanza Mine chips into their own custom
systems.
This implies that Intel will supply the silicon to some of
its customers, who will then create their own systems. This also meshes well
with Jack Dorsey's plans for BLOCK, which he says will create a "bitcoin
mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and
businesses worldwide." Of course, Intel could also manufacture complete
mining systems and bring them to market through partners, but we'll have to
wait to learn more about its go-to-market strategy.
Intel's first-gen Bonanza Mine chip sets a promising tone
for its second-gen Bonanza Mine chips that are already working their way out to
customers. However, there are still plenty of unknowns about the technical
details of the second-gen chips, like performance, efficiency, pricing, power
consumption, the process node, foundry used, and so on. We also don't know
Intel's plans for its future roadmap.