A few months ago, BitFury, one of the biggest companies in the Bitcoin mining market, announced that they were working on a new 28nm ASIC chip specifically aimed at mining operations, and while there weren’t many updates on the situation since then, this finally changed – BitFury have just announced that the chip is ready and it has gone through all of its development and production stages.
The company initially needed to raise funds before they could even begin their work on the chip, and they managed to secure $20 million from various investors, among which were Bill Tai, Bob Dykes and Fund. All in all, interest in the new chip was very high, and the company wasn’t facing too many difficulties trying to convince people to invest in their new project.
At the same time though, they had to work fast, as the market for Bitcoin mining equipment is starting to become really active and densely populated, leaving very little room for newcomers. Unless they have something particularly interesting to show, which was what helped BitFury in their particular case.
Valery Vavilov, CEO of the company, came out with an announcement claiming that the new chip was the most energy-efficient and high-performance technology produced by the company to date. BitFury are quite experienced with what they’re doing and they’ve managed to implement some impressive technology before, so this is no light statement by itself, even if it’s coming from within the company.
And BitFury are definitely not looking to stop there, as they have already announced their work on a next-generation 16nm chip, which they are expecting will deliver 0.06 J/Gh (joules per gigahash) in terms of performance, and it should come out on the market by the end of the year.
Their current chip is ranked at 0.2 J/Gh, a number that they spent quite a lot of energy advertising before they were ready with the major announcement. And for a good reason, as it’s definitely an impressive figure in the context of other chips available on the market.
In the beginning, Bitcoin enthusiasts were building their own customized computers to assist in the mining process, but it quickly became clear that this approach was not efficient and something even more specialized had to be done. Bitcoin mining chips are a relatively new technology, but they have been gaining popularity very fast, as they are a great solution to many of the problems related to mining for Bitcoins, allowing miners to keep the cost low. As the popularity if Bitcoin grows, so will the number of such solutions available on the market, and we should see even more impressive specialized products in the next months.