As we forge ahead in 2018, let’s review Bitmain’s year in key words!

In 2018, in the face of the ups and downs of the blockchain and AI industries, Bitmain remained true to its original aspirations and was determined to provide high-performance, low-power underlying computing power for blockchain and artificial intelligence. In just four years, we have achieved a 74.5% market share in the mining machine market, our mining pool share has always been leading, our AI chips have continued to iterate, and we have more and more ecological partners.

We are not afraid of the clouds blocking our view, because we are at the highest level. We adhere to the corporate values ​​of "keep improving, objective excellence", and make our products perfect through little efforts, and we believe that the market will give us due rewards. This article aims to review the nine key words of Bitmain in 2018, and encourage our fellow comrades in 2019.

7nm

On November 8, Bitmain launched the Antminer S15 equipped with a new self-developed 7nm chip, with a computing power of up to 28TH/S and an energy efficiency ratio of 57J/T. Compared with the previous generation of products, the performance has been significantly improved. This is our most powerful mining machine with energy-saving advantages to date, and it is also the most reliable 7nm mining machine product in the industry.

The S15 mining machine uses a 7nm custom chip BM1391, which integrates 1 billion transistors in a single chip, and significantly improves the performance of a single chip. At the same time, the 7nm chip innovatively uses the world's leading Exposed Die packaging solution, which has higher and faster heat dissipation efficiency, greatly improving the overall performance of the mining machine. Thanks to the leading technology of the 7nm chip, the Antminer S15 not only mines more persistently, but also helps miners save more electricity bills.

IPO

On September 26, Bitmain uploaded the A1 prospectus on the official website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and officially launched the plan to list on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to the prospectus, Bitmain's adjusted net profit for the whole year of 2017 and the first half of 2018 was as high as US$950 million.

In the future strategy of the prospectus, Bitmain stated that part of the funds raised will be used for the research and development and expansion of production of high-tech AI chips and AI applications. This will not only meet the vigorous demand for chip computing power in the era of artificial intelligence, but is also consistent with the high-tech development policies of countries around the world, and will help the company further develop into a world-leading high-tech chip design company.

AI in the Cloud

Bitmain's second-generation cloud AI chip BM1682 was released in mass production in the first quarter of 2018. It has a peak computing power of 3TFlops and a power consumption of 30W. It is Bitmain's second-generation artificial intelligence chip for deep learning. It can exist independently from the X86 CPU and support secondary development by customers. It has a single-chip eight-way H.264 and H.265 decoding capability, supports hardware acceleration for video image post-processing, supports Ethernet and PCIE multi-chip interconnection, and is easy to expand horizontally. Compared with the first generation, it has higher density and greatly improved actual performance.

Based on the BM1682 chip, Bitmain has developed the deep learning acceleration card SC3, intelligent server SA3, face recognition server SS3-C3 and embedded AI mini machine SE3, which are widely used in security, Internet, campus and other fields.

Endpoint AI

In July, Bitmain successfully launched the first generation of terminal AI chip BM1880, which is a deep learning reasoning AI chip focused on edge applications. It can provide 1TOPS computing power for 8-bit integer operations and support up to 2TOPS@INT8 under Winograd convolution acceleration. The specially designed TPU scheduling engine can effectively provide extremely high bandwidth data flow for all tensor processor cores. Around the terminal AI chip BM1880, a number of AI terminals for edge computing were launched at one time.

transparent

In July, Bitmain released a "Transparency Statement on Freight and Mining-Related Business Policies", committed to improving business transparency, promising full disclosure of self-mining algorithms, zero tolerance for secret mining, never attempting to mine "empty blocks", and public disclosure of freight and quantity information of new mining machines.

media

On July 3, CCTV's "News Broadcast" and "News 30 Minutes" programs successively showcased Bitmain's artificial intelligence products, including Bitmain's AI chips and intelligent traffic video analysis systems based on AI chips.

On June 12, the authoritative media and the official newspaper of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, Beijing Daily, reported on the front page the new economic achievements made by Haidian District in the first four months of this year. It mentioned that the information service industry contributed 35% to the economy, and highlighted Bitmain and its AI chips, a typical company that made great contributions.

Grand Slam

In the three major international college supercomputing competitions in 2018, ASC, ISC and SC, the Tsinghua University supercomputing team won the championship in all three competitions, achieving another "Grand Slam" after 2015. This is also the 11th championship won by the Tsinghua University supercomputing team in these three major international college supercomputing competitions. As a high-performance computing chip company, Bitmain has sponsored and provided hardware product support to the Tsinghua University supercomputing team since 2016, and the two sides have maintained close communication. In addition, the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University decided to establish a digital financial asset research center, which was donated by Bitmain to the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University.

Rocket

In September, the Houston Rockets accepted the sponsorship of Bitmain's Ant Mining Pool for the 2018-2019 season and used Bitcoin Cash (BCH) for payment, making it the world's first NBA team to support BCH payment sponsorship. Bitmain's mining pool also continues to maintain its leading position in the market.

AI Applications

The 20th China International Trade Fair for Investment and Trade, hosted by the Ministry of Commerce, came to an end in September. Recently, Bitmain received a letter of thanks and a special certificate from the organizing committee. At this event, Bitmain provided a facial recognition intelligent access solution based on Bitmain's second-generation AI chip, which undertook the entry and exit of more than 100,000 people, ensuring the safe and efficient convening of the conference. On June 18, the China Straits Project Achievement Fair was held in Fuzhou, and Bitmain ensured the safe and intelligent access of 130,000 spectators and staff on site. On the opening day, the main leaders of Fujian Province and Fuzhou City visited the Bitmain booth and praised the artificial intelligence products.

In 2018, Bitmain's AI products were rapidly put into use, and it has more and more ecological partners in the fields of Internet, security, smart parks, etc.