Green mining firm HIVE banks on Intel's crypto chips to double hash rate

Hive Blockchain Technologies (stylized as HIVE), a cryptocurrency mining company with a green energy strategy, has inked a deal with chipmaker Intel to purchase the firm's yet-to-be released crypto-mining focused chips, called the BMZ2. Expected to be deployed from the second half of this year, the bitcoin mining company claims that the new chips will lead to an increase of up to 95% in its aggregate hash rate from its current rate of 1.9 Exahash per second (Exahash per second (Eh/s). 

HIVE hasn't revealed the number of BMZ2s that will be supplied by Intel. The company, however, plans to incorporate the chips in its upcoming custom mining setup, which it claims will double its hash rate. Hash rate is the amount of computing power put towards mining cryptocurrencies.

The deal is amongst the first large orders Intel has received for its first-generation Bitcoin mining chips. Intel Bonanza Mine Z1 (abbreviated as BMZ1) was unveiled at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2022 in February. 

Also read: Intel reveals power, efficiency details of first-gen crypto mining chip, but has already moved to its 2nd gen

“Intel’s energy-efficient and high performance blockchain accelerator is expected to reduce our power consumption over current ASIC miners on the market.  HIVE will participate in the system development process from design verification, through to the prototype stages, and then factory & test engineering regimens to arrive at a production model; we are well-positioned and excited to undertake the process ahead," said Aydin Kilic President & chief operating officer of HIVE.

According to a submission with the US Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) filing by GRIID, and American infrastructure company that owns and operates a number of Bitcoin mining facilities, Intel's mining chips are slated to offer 135 terahash/second (TH/s) with an efficiency of 26 joules/terahash (J/TH).

“We expect that our circuit innovations will deliver a blockchain accelerator that has over 1000x better performance per watt than mainstream GPUs for SHA-256 based mining," Raja Koduri, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, said in an official note last month.