Tuesday, April 18th 2023
Intel Discontinues Blockscale Crypto Mining ASICs
Today Intel announced that they would be discontinuing production of their Blockscale 1000 series of ASICs built for cryptocurrency mining. Blockscale was designed by the Custom Compute Group within what was Intel's AXG graphics division at the time, and launched to market back in April 2022 when the value of Bitcoin was still above $40K USD. Blockscale initially succeeded with efficiency and supply advantages over competing ASICs as Intel leveraged their manufacturing capacity to produce the chips, however the valuation of the crypto currency market experienced a major slump over the second half of 2022. Intel's AXG has also recently seen a major restructuring, though there have been no mentions of what the operable status is of the Custom Compute Group. Support for existing Blockscale customers is set to continue for some time. Intel has not announced any possible follow-up crypto ASIC generation, only saying, "We continue to monitor market opportunities."
Intel's Blockscale was rather late to the market as far as crypto mining ASICs go. Early mining ASICs began hitting the scene in mid-2012 as FPGAs started to reach their limits in efficiency, and investment funds began to funnel into crypto startups. Intel's interest in cryptocurrency hardware lagged behind even their contemporaries at NVIDIA and AMD, both of which had crypto-focused variants of consumer GPUs on the market as early as 2017 during the first major mining-induced hardware shortages. Intel hasn't mentioned whether the timing of Blockscale contributed to its short shelf life, but Bitcoin is on its way back up after the recent slump, shooting up to around $30K USD just prior to Intel's announcement.
Intel's Blockscale was rather late to the market as far as crypto mining ASICs go. Early mining ASICs began hitting the scene in mid-2012 as FPGAs started to reach their limits in efficiency, and investment funds began to funnel into crypto startups. Intel's interest in cryptocurrency hardware lagged behind even their contemporaries at NVIDIA and AMD, both of which had crypto-focused variants of consumer GPUs on the market as early as 2017 during the first major mining-induced hardware shortages. Intel hasn't mentioned whether the timing of Blockscale contributed to its short shelf life, but Bitcoin is on its way back up after the recent slump, shooting up to around $30K USD just prior to Intel's announcement.