Intel unceremoniously ditching its 1-year-old Blockscale bitcoin mining chips

In April 2022, Intel announced a new Blockscale series of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) designed for “energy efficient blockchain hashing”. In other words, chips designed to mine bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. The company has positioned the Blockscale 1000 series ASICs to reduce power consumption and alleviate the ongoing shortage of GPUs.

“For ASIC-based systems and SHA-256 hash-compatible health check algorithms, the Intel Blockscale ASIC will provide the energy efficiency and processing power needed to achieve scalability and resiliency,”reads an unsigned Intel blog post. And given the nature of the silicon at the heart of this technology, Intel will be able to ship it in large volumes without jeopardizing the supply of new CPUs or GPUs.”

Today, Intel has quietly discontinued the Blockscale 1000 chips and told Tom’s Hardware that it does not plan to release any updates or replacements anytime soon. The company will “continue to support”companies that have already purchased Blockscale chips, but the project appears to be fading away just a year after its initial announcement.

When it comes to blockchain hashing operations like bitcoin mining, ASICs are better than GPUs, just like GPUs are better than CPUs. The hardware is more specialized which makes it less flexible – I can mine or play games with my GPU while the ASIC is only really good for one purpose. But in return, it can deliver faster hash rates with less power consumption than GPUs.

The Blockscale project came from the Intel Custom Compute Group, a specialized group within the Intel Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG) announced by AXG manager Raja Koduri in February 2022. But by December, AXG was split and merged with Intel. existing client computing and data center teams, and Koduri left the company at the end of March.

Intel introduced Blockscale chips just as the value of bitcoin was falling; The value of the currency has dropped from nearly $46,000 in April 2022 to less than $17,000 in December, and the less a currency is worth, the more difficult it is to justify the hardware investment and energy consumption required to run a mining operation. The currency has risen again to just over $30,000 in 2023, though this is still well below its peak of $64,000 at the end of 2021.

Intel has told Tom’s Hardware that it is phasing out Blockscale chips in part to focus on its nascent foundry business and its “IDF 2.0″strategy, an attempt to make more money by allowing third parties to use Intel’s factories. Earlier this month, Intel and Arm announced that the companies would be able to design and manufacture Arm chips using Intel’s upcoming 18A process.