All is past, the past and present of ASIC mining machines

Foreword by Uncle Mine: For a long time, the two most competitive mining machines in the mining industry are graphics card mining machines and ASIC mining machines. Uncle Mine has already introduced graphics card mining machines, so what is the story of ASIC mining machines?

Cover design | Moshang   Author | Moshang

In-depth article: 1659 words | 5 minutes to read

When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, his idea was to use home computers to mine Bitcoin blocks, so Satoshi Nakamoto's design was mainly to use the CPU to calculate hashes.

However, with the development of the times and the progress and gradual acceptance of digital currencies, the value of Bitcoin has also risen. This has created a new industry, mining, and at the same time, the competition is becoming increasingly fierce. The global computing power and difficulty are also gradually increasing . There is no other way but to compete with hardware.

CPUs, GPUs, and even FPGAs are all hardware chips that can be programmed to perform a wide range of tasks, but they differ in the range of tasks they can perform.

CPUs can run any software, GPUs require specific code and are only efficient when running highly parallel code. FPGAs go a step further and instead of just writing some software code, it’s actually more about designing a custom piece of hardware.

The ASIC mining machine that I am talking about today is quite special because it can do nothing but perform a specific task , such as executing a specific hash algorithm.

The Bitcoin we usually mine only performs SHA256 hash value calculations, which is a single task. Although the CPU and GPU can perform the calculations, it is not cost-effective in terms of cost and efficiency.

Therefore, in order to improve the efficiency of mining, mining machine companies have specially designed ASIC chips for SHA256 (or other algorithms) calculations.

ASIC is the abbreviation of Application Specific Integrated Circuit, which is an electronic circuit (chip) designed for a specific purpose . The chip used for mining is the mining machine ASIC chip.

Because they are designed to perform only a specific algorithm required for mining, the design of ASIC chips can be much simpler and the cost is much lower. But most importantly, in terms of mining computing power, ASIC can be tens of thousands of times higher than the CPU and GPU of the same era or even more .

For example, last year's mainstream Antminer S9 is an ASIC mining machine that uses 189 ASIC chips and has a computing power of 13.5TH/s . The price of the whole machine is only 10,000 yuan and the power consumption is only 1350W .

In comparison, the computing power of the flagship GTX1080Ti computer graphics card at the time would basically not exceed 60MH/s . The difference between 60M and 13.5T is hundreds of thousands times , and the price of a GTX1080Ti is 7,000 yuan, and the power consumption of a single card is over 300W .

So think about it, if you use GTX1080Ti to make a Bitcoin mining machine, in order to achieve the computing power of an Ant S9 ASIC mining machine that costs 10,000 yuan, the investment will be over 100 million yuan , which is exaggerated.

Therefore, you know why ASIC mining machines are used to mine Bitcoin (SHA256 algorithm), and no one uses GPU or other mining machines.

Here, I will tell you why there are so few ASIC mining companies. Because Asic chips require professional design, development and production. It is understood that the performance of Asic chips depends on two factors:

1. Better chip design

2. More advanced chip manufacturing technology

Compared with software development, any improvement in the chip development process takes longer to develop and test. And the progress of chip manufacturing process requires very large investment, so some semiconductor industry companies such as Intel, Samsung and Taiwan TSMC dominate this field.

Mining giants like Bitmain usually do not manufacture their own chips, but work with one or more large semiconductor industry companies. For example, TSMC is Bitmain's main chip manufacturing partner.

There are only a few large mining machine companies in the mining industry now. The competition among them is good for miners because competition will lead to price wars and promote the production of more energy-saving mining machines.

Ordinary miners can also purchase mining machines at relatively cheap prices, which will increase the number of retail investors and make the encrypted distributed network more secure.

In general, although the current coin price has led to a downturn in the mining industry, people's attention to ASICs will have a very positive effect on the economic ecosystem. These signs also indicate that cryptocurrencies are moving from the stage of speculative profit to the stage of value accumulation .