Intel Says Jack Dorsey's Block Is A 'First Customer' For Its New Bitcoin Mining Chip

Global technology giant Intel Corporation INTC has unveiled more details about its upcoming Bitcoin BTC/USD mining microchip.

What Happened: In a blog published on February 11, Intel declared its intent to contribute to the development of blockchain technologies with a roadmap of energy-efficient accelerators.

Raja M. Koduri, Intel’s General Manager of Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said that the company plans to engage and promote an open and secure blockchain ecosystem and will help advance this technology in a responsible and sustainable way.

“Our blockchain accelerator will ship later this year. We are engaged directly with customers that share our sustainability goals,” said Koduri.

Koduri was referring to an upcoming product – a  Bitcoin mining microchip titled “Bonanza mine” – which will be “ultra-low voltage” and energy-efficient.

Koduri noted that Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block Inc SQ is one of the first customers for this product, along with Bitcoin miners Argo Blockchain ADR ARBK and Griid Infrastructure GRDI.

“We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining,” he said.

Price Action: Intel shares traded 0.44% lower during the pre-market session on Monday. At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $42,478, down 0.09% in the last 24 hours.

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