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Intel Patent Filing For Efficient Crypto-Mining Chip Could Reshape The GPU Landscape

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Crypto-currency mining has been disrupting the GPU market for quite a while now. Mainstream graphics cards are selling for significantly more than their suggested retail prices and the most sought-after GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA for mining – like the Radeon RX Vega 64 or GeForce GTX 1070 – often sell for hundreds more than MSRP, if you can find them in stock at all.

A recently revealed patent filing from Intel may change that, however. In a patent filed on September 23, 2016, Intel lays out the details of a Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator. The actual title of the patent, which was posted yesterday to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, is “BITCOIN MINING HARDWARE ACCELERATOR WITH OPTIMIZED MESSAGE DIGEST AND MESSAGE SCHEDULER DATAPATH”.

GPU Prices Are Currently Inflated Due To Increased Demand From Crypto-Currency Miners.

NVIDIA

The device Intel outlines in the patent filing is a configurable SoC, or System On A Chip, that will mate low-power general purpose processing cores with hardware accelerators specifically designed for mining digital currency. Today’s GPUs are vastly superior to central processors like a Core i7 or AMD Ryzen for many crypto-currency mining algorithms, because the GPU’s many smaller, cores and high-bandwidth link to frame buffer memory can handle significantly more processing tasks in parallel than a CPU. But that fact remains that GPUs are not purpose built for crypto-mining and purpose built hardware can typically handle the specialized tasks it was designed for with higher performance and improved efficiency.

And that appears to be the goal for Intel’s potential mining SoC. The patent filing describes what the company claims is a highly power-efficient device for crypto-mining. After the initial hardware and setup costs, powering a GPU farm for mining is usually the biggest cost center. A single GPU may consume hundreds of watts, so keeping it powered up and mining can cost quite a bit over time. Multiply that by X number of GPUs, and costs add up fairly quickly.

Hopefully, Intel is on to something and new hardware arrives that’s highly efficient and not cost prohibitive. Should such a device arrive that’s compatible with an array of crypto-currencies, GPU prices should come back down, and give PC gamers worldwide a bit of a reprieve from the current pricing situation.