Intel today announced plans to create an accelerator specifically dedicated to blockchain technology, with the creation of the new Custom Compute Group as part of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics business unit. The new team’s goal is to create customized and optimized platforms for specific customer workloads, including blockchain and other accelerated supercomputing capabilities. Intel’s in-house blockchain accelerator will be available later this year, and the company says it is hard at work collaborating directly with major customers.: Argo Blockchain, BLOCK (formerly known as Square) and GRIID Infrastructure, among the first users of this new product. This architecture is implemented on a tiny silicon medium, ensuring that it has minimal impact on Intel’s current product supply.
“Intel Labs has devoted decades of research into developing reliable cryptography, hashing techniques and ultra-low voltage circuits. We expect the innovations applied in our circuits to lead us to offer a blockchain accelerator with a performance per Watt of over 1,000. times that of common SHA-256-based mining GPUs. There will be major updates at the International Solid State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) this month, “said Raja Koduri, senior vice president of architecture, graphics and Intel software. “To support this and other emerging technologies, Intel created the new Custom Compute Group as part of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics business unit. The new team’s goal is to create customized and optimized platforms for specific customer workloads, including blockchain and other accelerated supercomputing capabilities at the edge. “
“Looking ahead,” continues Koduri, we aim to use the technologies that will emerge from our zetta-scale computing initiative to provide energy-efficient solutions that allow us to look to a better tomorrow. “As a technology, the blockchain has the potential to allow everyone to own a good portion of the digital content and services they create. Some even see it as a watershed in the field of information technology, which will in fact subvert the ways in which we store, process and trade our digital assets, at the dawn of the era of the Metaverse and Web 3.0. In any case, whatever future developments may be, it will certainly be the widespread availability of ever greater computing power that will play a key role “.