A New Line of Powerful ASIC Miners Is Coming to Ethereum

New Ethereum Hardware

A chip designer with extensive experience in developing bitcoin mining devices is turning her sights on the ethereum protocol.

Chen Min, the former chief chip maker at bitcoin mining chip developer Canaan Creative, launched a new venture to build cryptocurrency mining devices called Linzhi. The firm’s first project tackles the ethhash algorithm used by ethereum and ethereum classic, with a new line of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) miners set to be released sometime next year.

Dubbed Project Lavasnow, Linzhi’s new ethereum miner claims to use 1/8th the amount of electricity as Bitmain’s ethash miners, according to a presentation Chen developed for the Ethereum Classic Summit held this week. It also expects to run 1,400 million hashes per second, compared to 190 from one of Bitmain’s AntMiners.

The increased hashpower means one of Linzhi’s miners should generate roughly $20 per day, compared to a projected $3 from a Bitmain miner. As a result, the company expects customers to break even on the cost of a miner within four months of purchase.

Linzhi did not announce how much each miner would actually cost.

At present, the company is still working on developing the product. Customers may begin receiving their miners in April 2019, according to the presentation.

While many individual miners and members of the ethereum community at present are opposed to ASICs, Chen said in her presentation that hardware alone does not cause centralization.

Rather, “it is the style of the business,” she said.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

New 7nm Bitcoin Mining Equipment From Triple-1 Co. Ltd.

Besides Canaan Creative, Bitmain, Innosilicon, & GMO Internet, another company is working on producing 7nm mining equipment. Triple-1 has been working on its 7nm bitcoin mining chips and expects to start shipping the equipment in November, shortly after GMO (a fellow Japanese ASIC Manufacturer)  expects to start shipping its 7nm miners.

Developing 7nm Mining Equipment

Triple-1 Co. Ltd., a Japanese company established in November 2016 and headquartered in Fukuoka, engages in ASIC chip development and cryptocurrency mining farm construction. The company began looking into developing 7nm bitcoin mining chips in February last year.

This week, Triple-1 confirmed that it has completed “the silicon wafer, the sample-chip, the sample-board and the prototype-unit of the mining [7nm] ASIC chip ‘Kamikaze.’”

A representative of the company told news.Bitcoin.com, “we have been conducting a verification of the function as well as the efficiency on the sample-chip and prototype unit,” adding that the company’s “partner foundry is TSMC Co. Ltd. (Taiwan).”

The power efficiency of Triple-1’s 7nm chip is listed at 0.05W/GH, which the company claims, reduces power consumption by at least 50 percent over a conventional 16nm chip.

The Kamikaze chip is the same size as conventional chips, but with a circuit density 5.2 times greater, the company claims, which boosts each chip’s performance to 300GH/s or more.

Triple-1 president and CEO, Takuya Yamaguchi, commented, “Although mining capacity is more than four times that of conventional products, power consumption is expected to be halved at maximum.”

Delivery Schedule

According to Triple-1’s development schedule, the sample 7nm mining unit is expected to be completed at the end of September. Mass production of Kamikaze chips is slated to start in the middle of October with the mining units delivered by the end of November.

Yamaguchi told the Sankei Shimbun:

We plan to ship samples in August and mass-produced items from October, and aim for 10 million chips per month in FY 2019.

In June, GMO Internet also unveiled its 7nm bitcoin mining chips and mining rigs. The company now has two models of its 7nm bitcoin miners, B2 and B3. Both are expected to ship at the end of October.