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Race To Mine Bitcoins Drives Enthusiasts Into the Chip Making Business

Posted by Soulskill on from the build-your-own-chips-to-build-your-own-currency dept.

holy_calamity writes "MIT Technology Review looks at the small companies attempting to build dedicated chips for mining Bitcoins. Several are claiming they will start selling hardware based on their chips early in 2013, with the technology expected to force many small time miners to give up. However, as happened in the CPU industry, miners may soon be caught in an expensive arms race that pushes development of faster and faster chips."

1 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Um? by Lagmo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually one of the more serious projects(ASICMINER) DO plan to use the first batches of chips to compensate the IPO investors by using them for mining and later to possibly help fund more R&D and production runs. Additional and future income will be based on sales of the hardware

    And since this is /. Preliminary chip info:
    Built on 130nm node process (approximately comparable to the Pentium III generation)
    It'll use a 15 x 15mm BGA package.
    It's expected to run at around 200-300Mhz
    It'll be a couple orders of magnitude more power efficient than GPUs and serveral times more than current FPGAs at hashing the SHA256 algorithm.
    More info here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.980 and older (but more geek bait): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0

    Project is only about 2/3rds of the way through the foundry process, so atleast a month left till these chips could be active on the BTC network.