Bitcoin Forum

Hello,
Why Intel discontinued its Bitcoin mining chip series?

https://www.theverge.com/23688338/intel-blockscale-asic-bitcoin-mining-crypto-discontinued
 (https://www.theverge.com/23688338/intel-blockscale-asic-bitcoin-mining-crypto-discontinued)
Does this affect the price of Bitcoin? This is definitely not good news.


Thank you.

This is what I could find in Tom's Hardware article as a reason why IBM discontinued their bitcoin mining chip


https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinues-bitcoin-mining-blockscale-chips-no-future-gens-announced



I dont think that this will affect bitcoin price much, if anything. Bitcoin got too big that it can be affected much with news like this.

Why they did it?

Read the article that I just shared. They wanna focus on other things so I guess bitcoin mining chips are not bringing them enough profits.

Hello,
Thank you so much for your reply.
Maybe vice versa. They made a lot of money and discontinued it. Nvidia did it too.

That wouldn't make sense from business point of view, to stop doing what brings you a lot of money.

Although that article did mention a lot of cuts, if you look at a lot of them, there are a lot that were not going to generate a profit any time soon.

But...What I find interesting is that as part of intel's business plan (IDM 2.0) they are going to produce chips for others. Since as of now Intel has some of the most advanced fab plants in the world.

Even now Bitmain and Canaan and the other players do not produce their own chips. BUT, I can't see them gong to intel to make them if they have a competing product.
Did someone do the numbers and figure out that making chips for miners is going to bring in more money then designing and making their own? Not something you say in public but could be one of the reasons why.

-Dave

You have a point, but I'm still going to stick to "what I said last year (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5393144.msg59775677#msg59775677)"... I don't think their objective was to compete with the likes of Bitmain and Canaan, but instead, to help others fill the gaps in the market.

Yeah I saw this news that's too bad. It would have been a good thing to have more options for ASICs manufacturers. Aren't the main ones in China? We definitely need more of a globally distributed supply chain for mining machines.


Personally what I would really like to see is smaller ASICs that are cheaper. New mining machines from what I can tell can cost many thousands of dollars when supply is low which makes it really hard to get into mining. It'd be great if there were options for smaller like $500-$1000 mining machines that have the efficiency of the expensive ones but just have less power.

They are cutting what they think is not profitable. I guess Intel simply got too big and too slow for the current ASIC market.

The link you shared also has the answer. It seems that bitcoin mining is not as profitable as other current businesses. But this reason is hard to believe because the price of bitcoin is recovering gradually and they can start making good gains in the future. However, Intel also claims that they might also be ending the production of LTE and 5G modems. Maybe other businesses have higher returns than the ventures they are abandoning. Who knows if the company has the intention of venturing into spaceships or artificial intelligence? Almost every firm is considering building its own AI to outsmart competitors.

That and they had to make serious cuts in order to stop their stock price from bleeding. They reduced their dividend and made cuts across the board while announcing outsourcing plans. I think companies are still a bit scared of recessions after the 2008 collapse that nearly bankrupted everyone. Intel is just trying make sure they can survive a US recession.

Intel has been around for a while. They applied to a patent for a Bitcoin miner in 2016: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10313108B2/en

https://i.imgur.com/3anrUdX.png

Here's the patent itself, granted a few years later: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/4f/47/48/83ef700835e37c/US10313108.pdf

So, I think there might be other reasons, not that they were new. Intel is struggling at the moment so maybe they just need to focus and stop anything that is not crucial for their vision.

No, their chip is way too bad.
Bitmain's 21 J/T is at speed around 500MHZ.
Intel's 26 J/T is at speed less than 100 mhz. Basiclly they are at 38-39 J/T if operating at 500MHZ.

I really don't know how Intel will let the chip tapeout

Intel is only a new comer in Bitcoin Mining ASIC producers and they are not competitive enough to early comers with more experience than Intel. Those competitors already have bigger customer base and Intel will have to start from the bottom with high challenging task to attract customers from those competitors.

That task won't be easily to achieve well so Intel just did a brave and smart decision by stopping their development in early phase. It would be done after they did made cost-benefit analysis.

But they can if they wanted to, I used to work with Intel late to early 2000's. They have their own R&D and for sure they could have seen that as a opportunity. Nevertheless, I doubt that they want to garner the market here, there are more interesting fields for them and most likely the management would still focus on that one rather have invested a lot of money and time with Bitcoin Mining hardware. So budget wise, doesn't make sense for them. Besides the competition is already though with Canaan and Bitmain already the face of Bitcoin Mining.

As big as Bitmain and Canaan are, Intel should have more capital compared to them, right? I can understand why they decide to stop though since other markets are definitely more interesting for them. Crypto is niche compared to CPU, GPU, and so on. Not to mention their GPU division is still in a shaky position right now. Plus their HEDT market was beaten by AMD in the last few years. It is understandable that they would rather try to improve their products there compared to Bitcoin mining.

This is more on the business move than any other else.  As Intel stated, they are prioritizing their IDM 2.0 project and they believe that continuing the crypto chip project will put them at a disadvantage especially when the lead graphic architect left the company this March[1].


I don't think it would affect the price of Bitcoin, aside from Intel, there are other companies that is dedicated to developing crypto chips, so it would be less competition for these company, and this is a piece of good news for them.  The space Intel left out will be replaced by another company so I do not think that this move of Intel will have a huge effect on the Bitcoin economy specifically on the Bitcoin mining industry.

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[1] https://www.theverge.com/23688338/intel-blockscale-asic-bitcoin-mining-crypto-discontinued

I won't worry much about it if I were you, are you following the latest Bitcoin mining news? Right now the Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased even more, no this won't affect Bitcoin price a bit, Intel isn't the only company building these chips, there are other many Asic manufacturing companies out there so we are in good hands.

Maybe intel need to focus more on it's CPU builds because its competitor, AMD is not slowing down at all, they just released another new Ryzen CPU with 24 Cores after the latest Ryzen 9 CPUs on the market right now.

Some gamers are making noise about this online that's how I get to know and some are dumping AMD saying of all the latest CPUs they released Intel 13th gen CPUs are way faster and better.

Why wouldn't they? I mean I feel like a business has one responsibility and that is making a profit, if you do not make any profit at all then there is no reason to produce anything, and they saw what it did and what it brought and they realized that was not something they can profit from (probably) and just gave up. Look at graphic card manufacturers as well, they had so much profit from selling out all the time, and even with that they still created an alternative type that couldn't be used for mining, which was still sold but after seeing the bad results it went to gamers instead.

You need to remember money now causing losses later is not a good money, you need less money if you have to, if it means more money later on.

Probably because it is becoming too expensive or less possible for them to be a preferred option over their competition. If they could compete, there's no reason why they wouldn't continue catering for the mining market.


No, it effects the price of mining hardware. Now that Intel has been removed from the miner chip market, other mining chip providers will be able to increase their prices as one less competitor exists in the market. If mining chip value increases, so does mining equipment. If mining equipment increases, the cost to mine does as well. Therefore, miners have higher expenses and must have a higher bitcoin price in order to be able to at least break even on their costs.

This probably won't price into the market right away. I believe it would be priced in when miners are forced to update their equipment and face higher prices for doing so.

I think Intel stopped them because they are too niche.

Intel is in trouble right now so they need something that will sell a lot. Like a CPU or a GPU for general processing.

Bitcoin mining might end up being profitable for them, but maybe they won't be selling enough units to justify it. They are now in a situation where they have to focus, otherwise they will collapse.