Intel will integrated mining accelerator, reducing energy consumption up to 35%

[FuninUSA]

Though the performance of cryptocurrency price is not ideal to the market since the first quarter of 2018, the  cryptos, especially bitcoin, still stay at a high price. Miners have been buying a large number of video CARDS or professional mining machines. And a large number of manufacturers have launched new products aimed at faster the mining. Now Intel is going to do the same.

The newest announcement of Intel’s patent in the United States Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO) displayed that, as early as September 2016, Intel has designed a kind of coins mining hardware accelerators, integrated in the CPU processor. The accelerators have been made special optimization for information summary and information scheduling data channel, and can cooperate with ASIC, SoC, CPU, FGPA and other hardware.

Intel does not emphasize how great the mining performance of the accelerator, but focus on energy efficiency, because now the mining of hardware, software, are forced to perform SHA - 256 endlessly, which cost too much electricity and take up a lot of space in hardware.

Intel claims that its mining accelerator is much smaller and has a high energy efficiency, reducing energy consumption by up to 35% compared with general-purpose processors. (recommend FuninUSA for more product reviews)

Now that the patent has been submitted for a year and a half, and it is now announced again, it looks like Intel's mining machine will soon be available.

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[buwaytress]

Efficiency in energy may be one thing but the eventual factor will be cost. If miners can still purchase ASICs at cheaper manufacturing, and if they cost less to maintain or replace, Intel's chipmaking will have a tough time keeping up. That 35% advantage is lab conditions too. Let's see if it shows up in real use.

The patenting indicates the cost will already be at a premium. Still. Good for competition.

[Stedsm]

Efficiency in energy may be one thing but the eventual factor will be cost. If miners can still purchase ASICs at cheaper manufacturing, and if they cost less to maintain or replace, Intel's chipmaking will have a tough time keeping up. That 35% advantage is lab conditions too. Let's see if it shows up in real use.

The patenting indicates the cost will already be at a premium. Still. Good for competition.

What can these accelerators do exactly? I mean, I need a bit more information over this.
Any sources to learn more about this? Is it something that increases the hashes/sec using low electrical units by overclocking the hardware already installed for mining, for eg.; ASICs? This is seriously interesting and I want to learn more about mining part and how will the blockchain work ahead once such competition arises. Will these increase the difficulty ratio or keep it the same but decrease the amount of electricity it consumes in order to gain the same amount of hashes that these hardwares are already getting?

[LoyceV]

Efficiency in energy may be one thing but the eventual factor will be cost.

In the end, miners will find a new equilibrium between hardware and electricity costs on the one hand, and block rewards on the other hand. If hardware becomes more efficient, they'll buy more hardware and consume more power again. And if they don't do it, someone else will.
The only way to really use less energy, is if the mining hardware is so much more expensive that it takes a larger share of the total costs, which leaves less money to be spend on electricity. But I wouldn't be surprised if most of the energy savings are consumed again by the hardware manufacturer. It's not as if CPU production doesn't consume a lot of energy!

[andrew1carlssin]

Efficiency in energy may be one thing but the eventual factor will be cost.

In the end, miners will find a new equilibrium between hardware and electricity costs on the one hand, and block rewards on the other hand. If hardware becomes more efficient, they'll buy more hardware and consume more power again. And if they don't do it, someone else will.
The only way to really use less energy, is if the mining hardware is so much more expensive that it takes a larger share of the total costs, which leaves less money to be spend on electricity. But I wouldn't be surprised if most of the energy savings are consumed again by the hardware manufacturer. It's not as if CPU production doesn't consume a lot of energy!

I was thinking about that economical aspect of mining ...

I wonder if mining is a zero-sun game, (like trading) where you just need to beat others miners to stay on step ahead

Regards to the technical electricity consumption I also wondering if there is something regards to parallelism ..

something like ..

"As processor chips become increasingly parallel, an efficient communication substrate is critical for meeting performance and energy targets. In this work, we target the root cause of network energy consumption through techniques that reduce link and router-level switching activity. We specifically focus on memory subsystem traffic, as it comprises the bulk of NoC load in a CMP."

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5948569/?reload=true

ps-> I remember to heard a debate between "makers Vs coders" regards programmers do not know how to parallel   

and we used to see memes like ..
CPU Dance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNhubpzhs-Q

[LoyceV]

I wonder if mining is a zero-sun game, (like trading) where you just need to beat others miners to stay on step ahead

Mining drains money from the Bitcoin ecosystem. If miners pay x million dollars per day on electricity, someone else has to put x million dollars into Bitcoin.

Regards to the technical electricity consumption I also wondering if there is something regards to parallelism ..

Mining computations don't depend on previously calculated results, so you can run as many in parallel as your hardware can handle.

[pebwindkraft]

...
Mining drains money from the Bitcoin ecosystem. If miners pay x million dollars per day on electricity, someone else has to put x million dollars into Bitcoin.

This is an interesting perspective: when you say "drain", it sounds like something got lost. I think the opposite is true, something with value is created. miners convert electrical power into bitcoins.
And as with nearly all things in economy, the process of refining (adding value) is a standard. Wether it is an electrical device (like smartphones), a tool (like a hammer) or food processing, everywhere "low level material" is converted by some processing steps into something that has higher value. And of course people are ready to pay for it. Same is true in bitcoin / crypto space. The cheap energy is converted into bitcoin, which has a higher value and people find use cases for it (facilitating payments).

[DevilOper]

... are forced to perform SHA - 256 endlessly ...

Is all this crappy flood just about Intel SHA-256 extentions?

[buwaytress]

Efficiency in energy may be one thing but the eventual factor will be cost.

In the end, miners will find a new equilibrium between hardware and electricity costs on the one hand, and block rewards on the other hand. If hardware becomes more efficient, they'll buy more hardware and consume more power again. And if they don't do it, someone else will.
The only way to really use less energy, is if the mining hardware is so much more expensive that it takes a larger share of the total costs, which leaves less money to be spend on electricity. But I wouldn't be surprised if most of the energy savings are consumed again by the hardware manufacturer. It's not as if CPU production doesn't consume a lot of energy!

And we're also talking about renewable resources here. I daresay that these new computing hardware that's always aiming to be more efficient (energy and space wise, usually) are requiring more and more material that's scarce - rare metals, etc. These are getting more and more expensive, so CPU production not only consumes a lot of energy but a finite source of rare material that will get even more scarce as production levels multiply - and along with that, demand.

Like you said, though, equilibrium is always eventually reached and there's still so many variables that could change during the timespans. Not least Bitcoin price.