Intel obtains new patent to reduce Bitcoin mining energy consumption by 15%

Global technology giant Intel has obtained a patent related to cryptocurrency mining, Coindesk reported on November 30.

This week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Intel a patent that outlines a processor capable of "energy-efficient, high-performance mining of Bitcoin," specifically for the SHA-256 algorithm, the mining algorithm for the world's largest cryptocurrency by market value.

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According to reports, Intel had previously sought patents in the field of cryptocurrency mining. Moreover, Intel's foundry 21 Inc has also been engaged in the production of mining chips. 21 Inc was later renamed Earn.com and was eventually acquired by Coinbase.

According to the patent document, miners in the Bitcoin network are rewarded by solving a series of mathematical puzzles. However, Bitcoin network mining machines usually require hardware accelerators such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which consume a lot of energy.

Additionally, processing 32-bit nonce (the string of characters used in transactions) is more dependent on the use of hardware accelerators, and current ASICs have redundancy in multiple stages of processing these transactions.

As the patent explains:

Dedicated Bitcoin mining ASICs are used to implement multiple SHA-256 engines that can deliver thousands of hash operations per second and consume over 200 watts of power. The implementation of the new patent will employ microarchitectural optimizations, including the selective hardwiring of certain parameters in Bitcoin mining calculations.

The patent document states that hardwiring these parameters will reduce the amount of calculations required by the mining machine, and it is expected that such a system will reduce the amount of electricity required by the chip by 15%. And such a chip will also be smaller than the conventional chips currently used by Bitcoin miners.

The patent also suggests that changing the validity comparison of the 32-bit nonce could further reduce power requirements.

The patent states:

Instead of comparing the hash result to a target value, Bitcoin mining applications determine whether the final hash result has the least leading zeros.