According to the company, Bonanza Mine (BMZ2) is an ultra-low voltage energy-efficient bitcoin mining ASIC that delivers 40 terahertz per second (TH/s). Intel’s Bonanza setup. Source: 2022 IEEE as reported by Cointelegraph.
Intel has announced details about its ASIC called Bonanza Mine, which is designed for bitcoin mining. The company also unveiled a system based on 300 low-power chips that can compete with the best chips from Bitmain and MicroBT.
The Bonanza chip is manufactured in a 7nm process (probably by TSMC, but it’s not certain) and measures just 4.14 × 3.42 mm, which translates to an area of 14.16 mm2. The small chip area maximizes the use of silicon wafer area – up to 4000 crystals can be fabricated on a single 300-mm wafer. The ASIC is housed in a BGA package that measures only 7 x 7.5 mm – smaller than many DDR4 memory chips in the same package type.
Each Bonanza chip has 258 mining blocks, each processing two SHA256 functions in parallel. These blocks take up 90% of the chip’s footprint. The chips operate at 1.35-1.6 GHz and have a nominal voltage of only 355 mV with a single chip performance of 137 gigahertz/s. This results in energy efficiency of 55 joules per terahash, with a peak energy efficiency of 20 joules per terahash at 290 mV.
The 300-chip Bonanza system shown delivers 40 terahash/s in normal operation and consumes 3600 W. The peak performance of this system is 47.7 terahash/s and 34 terahash/s in reduced power mode. Still, Intel says this system significantly outperforms its competitors in terms of power efficiency. The company compares it to the Bitfury Clarke and the Avalon A9, which have higher specific power consumption and lower overall performance.
The system unveiled by Intel consists of four boards, each with 75 Bonanza chips on it. The control unit based on an Intel-developed FPGA with Arm Cortex core is responsible for their smooth operation. This core is responsible for running the mining software as well as distributing loads to the ASICs and checking the values they produce. A 10 Mbyte/s UART bus is responsible for the communication between the control module and the ASIC boards. The Ethernet controller is responsible for the network connection. Also, note the presence of a programmable power supply.
This means that Intel offers a ready-to-go system: Just install the software and plug it in, and the money flows. But that’s not a sure thing. However, Intel will initially sell these solutions only to a few customers who have already signed contracts for several years in advance. The planned production volumes and costs are not yet known.
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