Raja Koduri, Vice President and General Manager of Intel Graphics and Accelerated Computing Systems, has confirmed that the chip giant has decided enter the blockchain sectora very important movement, and very interesting, not only because of all that this means for Intel as a company, but also because of the news that it could leave us at the hardware level, and that is that the Santa Clara company plans to launch dedicated accelerators that they will be much more efficient, and much more interesting.
In this sense, it should be noted that Intel Labs has a long experience everything related to highly reliable cryptography, as well as hashing techniques and ultra-low voltage circuits. With this in mind, we can get an idea of what the company could be able to present when we talk about specialized blockchain accelerators.
Can’t you just get an idea? Well, don’t worry, Intel hasn’t wanted to leave us in doubt either. According to those from Santa Clara, their innovations could give rise to the arrival of specialized blockchain accelerators that would have 1,000 times higher performance per watt. If this is confirmed, mining with GPUs under SHA-256 will no longer make sense.
Very interesting, without a doubt, but this has not been the only news that Raja Koduri has confirmed. The executive has also said that, to support this emerging technology, they have created the new Custom Computing Group, which will be integrated into the graphics and accelerated computing computer systems business unit, and which will aim to create optimized chip platforms adapted to the needs of each client. This includes, as is evident, both the development of accelerators focused on blockchain and other types of solutions focused on accelerated supercomputing and the edge.
From what I’ve been able to read, it looks like that new set of custom solutions will be focused on the professional sector, an important differentiating nuance since it suggests that, a priori, Intel does not plan to design custom chips for the general consumer sector, that is, it does not plan to follow in the footsteps of AMD with Xbox One, Xbox Series XS, PS4 and PS5. This may change at some point because, in the end, it is a fairly lucrative business, and because Intel has already made its first steps with the processor of the first Xbox, but the truth is that it seems unlikely to me, at least in the short and medium term .
