The bitcoin mining industry is having an exciting couple of days. Just a day after Bitfury revealed a new 14nm mining chip called the Bitfury Clarke, Bitmain has upped the ante with the announcement of a new 7nm application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) processor that it says offers better hashing power and energy efficiency over older models.
The ASIC – a powerful type of chip designed for specific types of computation – was announced Friday by Jihan Wu, CEO and co-founder of the Beijing-based firm, at the World Digital Mining Summit in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Designed to mine cryptocurrencies using the SHA256 algorithm – a group that includes bitcoin – the “BM1391” chip will also be powering an upcoming range of Bitmain’s Antminer series of mining machines, Wu said, according to a company blog post.
The company says BM1391 uses an advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology called 7nm FinFET, integrates “more than a billion transistors” and is optimized for energy efficiency. Wu further said said that, in tests, the chip “can achieve a ratio of energy consumption to mining capacity that is as low as 42J/TH.”
So far the firm has not released detailed specifications for the new ASIC, however. Bitmain says it is now moving to mass-produce the new ASIC. In June, Japanese tech giant GMO also said it was launching the “world’s first” 7nm ASIC, slating the first shipments for October.