It has been noted in the media that at the upcoming ISSCC conference at the end of February, Intel is set to give a talk entitled ‘Bonanza Mine: An Ultra-Low Voltage Energy Efficient Bitcoin Mining ASIC’. The current state of play regarding Bitcoin mining is led by application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. Update 2: Intel reached out to inform us that the ISSCC talk is regarding their first generation BZM1 ASIC. In the early days of ASICs, these were essentially FPGA-hardened IP blocks scaled up and scaled out. That was a number of years ago now, and some of these companies are on their 8th generation ASICs, and are leading partners at the major foundries leading-edge process technologies. There are companies in the industry, such as Bitmain and MicroBT, that work with partners like TSMC to create Bitcoin-specific silicon as miners to chase the Proof-of-Work-based cryptocurrency. However in the context of the more traditional silicon players, we haven’t seen much movement on this front. In all likelihood, this means that BZM1 is being built at Intel, and this could be one of the first IDM 2.0 customers for Intel utilizing Intel’s in-house custom design team – the SEC filing is co-signed by Intel’s GM of Custom Accelerators, for context.
For example, Bitmain’s next-generation ASIC product installs 384 chips in a system, and in a single transaction has already sold 78000 systems (29.5m chips) to Marathon Digital Holdings for $879 million – and that’s only one customer. Update: Last week, one of Intel’s Senior Directors, we believe the director of Custom Accelerators, was hired by Bitfury. Intel’s second generation chip is listed in an SEC filing. This is despite Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger often repeating the pledge to be more open. I spoke with a colleague who focuses more on the mining/ASIC space, and he stated that it’s likely having US-based ASIC production is a benefit for locality, language and relations, and avoiding additional 25% tariffs currently on mining hardware. Currently those GPUs are now being used for ASIC-resistant algorithms and chains such as Ethereum, and it’s part of the reason (but not the only reason) why prices of gaming graphics cards are so high – if you can ‘earn’ enough mining to pay off the card in weeks or months, it becomes a no-brainer purchase for large mining operations. In the filing, BZM2 details are redacted. But we have more details.
Through a number of channels, we’ve been able to acquire more details about this chip ahead of the conference. The chip is 14.16 mm2 (so a maximum of 4000 chips per wafer), operates at 1.6 GHz, and generates 137 gigahash (137GH) per second at 2.5 W. 25 of these chips are used in a deep board configuration, voltage stacked at 335 mV per chip, totaling 8.875V main supply. At 137 GH and 2.5 W, it would mean 18.2 W/TH. It’s worth noting that if Intel had an order for 29.5 million chips (as noted above, for $867m), at perfect yield at 4000 per wafer, it would take almost 7500 wafers. In order to compete for density then, we’re going to see systems with 2-3x more chips. Intel is going to say at ISSCC that it takes 55 J per TH, although the math here doesn’t make sense given the other numbers it is presenting. It’s going to be a way for Intel to fill up its 7nm fabs with small high-yielding silicon at any rate.
The GPU vendors are fighting with miners and Ethereum, but there hasn’t really been any movement on focused silicon in this field – at least until Intel started dropping hints. The need to produce and enable silicon very quickly made it very rushed to begin with, and the companies involved had limited experience of traditional silicon development and deployment timeframes. According to the filing, it’s called BZM2, and there is already a financial agreement with a customer. The agreement with Griid is for its second generation BZM2 ASIC, which will be discussed at a later date. The filing is a four-year supply agreement between Intel and Griid Infrastructure, starting on September 8th, 2021, and the BZM2 chip is designed specifically for SHA-256 cryptographic hash functions. We ran the numbers back from the S19j Pro 104, built on TSMC N7, knowing that a full system contains 384 chips at 2750-3250 W. It equates to around 7-8 W per chip, which is 3x what Intel is suggesting their chip can do. Intel provides no warranty on the chips except for DOA, and also provides 3-month support after each batch of chips are delivered.
