Intel has been awarded a patent for a processing system that makes Bitcoin mining efficient. According to the patent document, Intel can now mine bitcoin using “energy-efficient hardware accelerators.”
Optimized SHA256 Datapath
The patent is titled the “Optimized SHA256 Datapath,”. Going by its documentation, the patent is expected to reduce the amount of power consumed by miners currently in the market by 15 percent.
According to Intel, a cluster of SHA engines is likely to consume more than 200 watts of electricity during mining. With the new invention, Intel claims a myriad of SHA-256 stages and methods of processing hash by utilizing optimized data paths will be taken advantage of.
Intel is not New to Crypto
This is not the first time Intel Corporation which is the world’s second-largest semiconductor chip maker and has its headquarters in the U.S will be venturing into the crypto space. The tech giant has formed partnerships with several leading crypto focused firms such as Ledger and Bitpay in recent times.
According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Intel filed for the patent on June 29, 2016, and the inventors were listed as three individuals from Hillsboro, Oregon. The company was granted the Patent Nov 27, 2018. According to the USPTO, the patent has been described as a blueprint for designing specialized processing system for mining the SHA256 algorithm.
To back this up, Intel has also made it known that it has invented a more efficient SHA256 mining (BCH, BTC) process. According to the report, “the mining process is optimized by using SHA256 datapaths.”
With the invention, the overall power consumption used by today’s application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) machines will be reduced by about 15 percent.
The patent description also states that:
“Embodiments of the present disclosure include energy-efficient ASIC-based SHA engines that consume less power for Bitcoin mining operations,”