Bitcoin Forum

Intel has a patent for an efficient Bitcoin miner granted and active since late 2018, but they haven't released any miner yet:

Optimized sha-256 datapath for energy-efficient high-performance bitcoin mining (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180006808A1/en)

NVidia has released GPUs specialized for mining altcoins (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/), but no Bitcoin miner released. Curiously though, NVidia Now software uses bitcoin JS for something (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce-now/open-source-licensing/).

Looking at the latest USB miner from GeckoScience, the Compac F (https://bitcoinmerch.com/products/gekkoscience-compac-f-fan-upgrade-combo-up-to-270gh-s), it shows that the miner itself is made in the US, but the chip used(BM1397) is from Bitmain, in China.

Bitmain recently released a new miner, the Antminer S19XP (https://hashrateindex.com/blog/bitmains-antminer-s19xp-new-bitcoin-miner), which performs even better than the previous ones.

Are all the American chip makers unable to beat Bitmain, or is there another reason for this?

No, the AMD and nVidia GPUs were not designed for Bitcoin mining,
people wrote code to use the parallel abilities of the GPUs to mine much faster than CPUs.

Since sha256 is quite a simple process but with 64 steps, that can be parallelized well with the simple integer cores in GPUs.

In fact Scrypt has it's parameters set specifically to work in GPUs though Charlie Lee lied about it at the start and claimed otherwise.
Obvious proof, Scrypt mining uses GPUs. :P

Because mining is a very small market and dedicated miners have a very short lifespan vs, CPUs, memory and all the other things these companies still produce.
Larger companies, like Samsung have entered the market and left quickly since it was such a small portion of their revenue it was not worth dealing with.
Why fight to enter a small market with known players that is not going to increase your bottom line enough to matter.

-Dave

To show a large sales model about 20 million vehicles were sold in the USA  one 2020.

Pretend 4 million are new and use some chips.  Almost no car or truck is 20k so pretend they average 35k x 4 million that is 140 billion in new car sales all involve chips just for the USA.

a s19 sells at 10k maybe 100,000 sold = 1billion in sales may 2x tops is 2 billion for the world vs 140 billion for just usb sales.

toss in tv's
microwaves

and multiply by a factor of 5-10 to cover the world demand and it is over a trillion vs 1,2,3 billion

Just noticed this post. If you read the patent it tells you all you need to know about what Intel is about, ie an optimized, energy efficient datapath. I suspect they gave this project to an intern or new employee who was interested in Bitcoin. If you don't have a well timed sha-256 design it will result in adders and other logic elements switching mutilple times to get a result instead of one. There are several other implementations that preceed Bitcoin, most notable from Professor Luigi Dadda, a true digital pioneer who sadly died in 2012; he didn't try to patent his optimisation and that says a lot about Intel's 'suits'.

Intel have much better uses (and profits) for their silicon than using it for bitcoin miners, and it's the same for Qualcomm and the other big hitters (even thought they don't have their own fabs). Believe me when I say that in the unlikely event that either of those corporations decided to build a mining chip, it would comprehensively outperform what currently exists.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-to-unveil-bitcoin-mining-bonanza-mine-asic-at-chip-conference

Intel doesn't have a good mobile phone chip either.
They are just behind in everything that's now datacenter or PCs.