Samsung begins to produce Bitcoin mining chips

Samsung begins to produce Bitcoin mining chips
Image of Samsung’s semiconductor foundry. Source: Samsung Press release

The South Korean electrical giant Samsung has already started to produce ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining. This gives the Chinese ASIC forges competition from South Korea.

Several South Korean magazines report that Samsung has already started the production of ASIC chips and is targeting their sale for the end of January. The technology group is already under contract with a previously unnamed Chinese manufacturer of ASICS in order to produce the chips in the external order as a so -called «foundry» as a so -called «foundry».

Samsung has one of the largest and most modern semiconductor forges in the world, even if the production volume is still a good distance from the world’s largest foundry from TSMC, which recently made headlines that Bitcoin mining is one of the growth drivers of semiconductor production. It is striking that Samsung Foundry is already able to produce 10 or 8 nanometers of small chips and plans to ensure 7NM chips for 2018. Since the most modern Bitcoin miners from Bitmain, the S9, still build on 16nm chips, the works from Samsung’s Foundry could trigger a new performance boost for the mining industry. Whether Bitmain is even the unknown mining manufacturer and so that its market power will continue to expand, or whether another company, such as the makers of the Dragonmint miner, will compete with Samsung’s chip smithy Bitmain-this is currently still in the stars.

The production of Bitcoin asic chips is the most decided step of the South Korean technology group to cryptocurrencies. However, not the first: In autumn 2017, the company demonstrated that old Samsung smartphones can be transformed into a mining rig. Some engineers from Samsung have shown how to recycled 40 S5 smartphones so that the devices dig up cryptocurrencies. At that time, Samsung also announced that the Russian mining manufacturer Baikal will be supplied with ASIC chips. Unlike Bitmain, Baikal specializes in ASICS that do not generate bitcoins, but coins with other algorithms such as X11 or Blake.

In addition to the Asics, Samsung already earns dram for graphics cards on the mining boom. The company has started to produce 16GB dram chips (GDDR6) with a size of 10nm in mass production. This RAM is twice as fast as the previous GDDR5 chips. Graphics cards that want to keep up in the mining gold rush need these chips produced exclusively by Samsung.

In addition to Samsung and TSMC, a third technology giant from Asia is currently entering Bitcoin mining: The leading Japanese Internet company GMO already announced in September 2017 to be produced 7NM ASIC chips to operate a large mining farm in Northern Europe with them. In the next few years there should be a race in the next few years, who is the first to exploit moores law in Bitcoin mining by driving the ASIC chips to the physical minimum. One could also say that Bitcoin mining has become a technological ode on the hash algorithm SHA256.