Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block is buying Bitcoin (BTC) mining chips from Intel in order to boost their equipment production plans.
According to a new blog post, Block’s purchase of Intel’s ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips will accelerate their plans to enter the Bitcoin mining market.
Block says they were designing their own ASICs when the opportunity to purchase equipment from Intel arose since Intel is reportedly discontinuing production of its ASICs.
“In the past year, we completed the design of a high performing Bitcoin mining ASIC on the 5-nanometer semiconductor node. Our original plan had been to do a full tape out of this design this quarter. However, as we were planning this tape out, we learned of an opportunity to acquire a large volume of Bitcoin mining ASICs from Intel, and just completed a purchase agreement with Intel. This immediate access to production ASICs accelerates our mining system development, enabling us to get to market more quickly.”
Block also says the purchase allows them to now focus on designing its own cutting-edge 3-nanometer chips. The company says it’s in the process of finalizing a design of a 5-nanometer chip for Bitcoin mining.
“Additionally, we can now focus our design team exclusively on cutting edge 3-nanometer ASIC development. In support of our 3-nanometer ASIC development, this month we moved forward with manufacturing a prototype of our completed 5-nanometer design.
This is an exciting milestone which will allow us to experiment with design variants, validate our design work, and calibrate our testing on real silicon. We expect to receive the prototypes back this fall. They will be a valuable input into our 3-nanometer ASIC development work.”
Block says they decided to enter the Bitcoin mining equipment market because they have ASIC experience, which they use for their point-of-sales payments app, and for the integrity of the Bitcoin network as a whole.
“And perhaps most importantly, our primary motivation for this initiative is to increase the decentralization, transparency, and resiliency of the Bitcoin network.”
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