Intel has quietly announced that it will stop selling its crypto mining hardware chips, less than a year after entering the business.
Chipzilla's crypto-adjacent offering, announced in April 2022, is a Block-scale ASICs designed to speed up SHA-256 processing for proof-of-work applications, and the chipmaker claims hash rates of 580 giga-hashes per second.
Which is pretty fast. But the product is June 2022. debut It came just as the cryptocurrency market was beginning a precipitous decline and just weeks before Ethereum, one of the most popular coins and therefore a source of demand for mining hardware, in transition to a proof-of-stake model that has much smaller computing requirements.
On April 7, the chipmaker quietly launched a product change notification stating that it would stop shipping its Blockscale 1000 series chips on April 20, 2024. But in case you've been itching to snag some soon-to-be-gone mining gear, Intel will continue taking orders for the chips through October 20.
"As we prioritize our investments in IDM 2.0, we have reached the end of life of the Intel Blockscale 1000 Series ASIC while continuing to support our Blockscale customers," an Intel spokesperson said. Register.
For what it's worth, Intel isn't the only vendor less enthusiastic about building a crypto kit. nvidia, thrown out Dedicated mining CPUs under their Cmp Hx line in early 2021, but in March 2023 decided that cryptocurrencies do not "bring anything useful to society".
Of course, that was only after Nvidia, and AMD for that matter, enjoyed years of massive profits as cryptominers paid premiums for consumer-grade GPUs. Intel's entry into the mining space came too late for even that.
The fate of Intel's Blockscale ASICs continues CEO Pat Gelsinger's policy of cutting loose unprofitable or distracting businesses. After a particularly bad third quarter last fall, Intel pledged to cut spending by $10 billion a year by 2025 and has since canceled projects, revised roadmaps, classified products and he cut his template significantly.
Last week, the company confirmed that it was sale a division responsible for the design and planning of server-level systems, to the Taiwanese computer maker MiTAC. Previously, Intel scrapped two R&D projects valued at roughly $1 billion, it cut investments in RISC-V development, it finished development of its Tofino switch and rewrote its GPU roadmap.
The latest cuts come just weeks before Intel is due to report its first-quarter earnings, which by its own admission it could end up looking a lot like the crypto market at the time of Blockscale's launch. The company previously forecast a 37-43 percent revenue drop for the first quarter, and it wouldn't be a surprise. Register At least Intel will announce more cuts along with its financial data next week. ยฎ
