Since the start of the year, and indeed since Meta announced that it was working on a metaverse, the conversation surrounding Web3 has reached fever pitch.
There has been much talk about investment, but on Friday Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja Koduri detailed Intel’s plans for a blockchain focused chip.
“We are mindful that some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates to an immense amount of energy. Our customers are asking for scalable and sustainable solutions, which is why we are focusing our efforts on realizing the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale,” wrote Koduri.
As an example, the Bitcoin network consumes approximately 125.13TWh per year. That’s higher than the energy consumption of Ukraine according to data from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. That is just one network and the energy consumption of blockchain based solutions is only going to grow.
Intel calls its solution to this problem a blockchain accelerator and it claims that through its innovations, its solution is 1 000 times more efficient than mainstream GPUs for SHAD-256 based mining.
“Our blockchain accelerator will ship later this year. We are engaged directly with customers that share our sustainability goals. Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square) and GRIID Infrastructure are among our first customers for this upcoming product. This architecture is implemented on a tiny piece of silicon so that it has minimal impact to the supply of current products,” says Koduri.
There aren’t many more details about the physical chip, but Intel says it will share more at the International Solid State Circuit Conference later this month.
However, Koduri did mention that Intel will be setting up a new Custom Compute Group within its Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics business. The goal of this unit is to build custom silicon that is both optimised for the workloads of the blockchain and other custom accelerated supercomputing opportunities.
We await more details on both new developments at Intel and hope the energy efficiency claims are as drastic as promised.
