Analysis of the design trend of Bitmain mining machines in China

Although the cryptocurrency market has had its ups and downs, as several wealthy people have been created in the past, more and more people are rushing into the mining market.

The cryptocurrency landscape is constantly changing. The Spring and Autumn Period, when Bitcoin was the dominant currency, is a thing of the past. We are now entering the Warring States Period, where Ethereum is leading the way and hundreds of cryptocurrencies are booming. The mining machine supply chain manufacturers that sell high-speed computing shovels have also seen their revenues double in recent times.

In the case of Bitcoin transactions, the work of verifying transactions is decentralized and relies on users to assist each other in verification. The verification process is to let the computer solve a series of complex cryptographic problems. After solving the problems and completing the verification, the wallet addresses of both parties to the transaction, the transaction amount, time and other related information can be added to the new "block". This whole process is called "mining", and the "miners" who successfully complete the verification can receive a certain number of Bitcoins as a reward.

The difficulty of solving the problem will become more difficult as more and more people invest in mining, and miners will also need to use more powerful computers to successfully solve the problem. In order to improve computing power, miners will pool their respective computer computing power to jointly mine, and then split the profits according to the degree of contribution. Therefore, it has become increasingly difficult for individual miners to compete with professional mining organizations.

The place where organizations gather is called a "mining pool", which is usually located in countries with relatively low electricity costs such as China. Currently, 58% of the world's major mining pools are from China. The mining trend is accompanied by the problem of energy consumption. It is also reported that some scholars and scientists use public resources and supercomputers with extremely high computing power to mine.

China's Bitmain mining machine design trend is moving towards lower energy consumption and larger memory

The Bitmain S9 designed by Bitmain is a mining machine specifically for Bitcoin and is currently the most popular model. In the future, the number of Bitcoins will become increasingly scarce, and it will become increasingly difficult to achieve mining. In addition, the hash calculation method used by Bitcoin is mainly based on the SHA-256 algorithm, which not only consumes computing power but also consumes a lot of energy. Therefore, Bitmain began to develop the F3 mining machine for Ethereum.

In the future, Bitmain will launch the Ethereum mining model F3, which is designed to pursue lower energy consumption and larger memory. Each mining machine has 3 motherboards, each motherboard is equipped with 6 mining-specific ASIC processors, and each ASIC processor is equipped with 32 1Gb DDR3 memories.

The memory of an F3 mining machine will be equipped with 72 Giga Byte DRAM. The current Bitcoin S9 mining machine only has 512MB DDR3, which is much larger than the memory. The F3 pursues low energy consumption and enhanced efficiency. After its official launch in the future, it may impact some PC mining markets that use graphics chips for mining.

In addition to the recent benefits to the mining machine supply chain, the demand for high-speed computing in mining has also boosted the revenue of traditional motherboard manufacturers.

In addition to the recent benefits to the mining machine supply chain, the demand for high-speed mining computing has also boosted the revenue of traditional motherboard manufacturers. The demand for motherboards can be seen in April, but in the long term, we still need to pay attention to the risks of mining disasters and virtual currency bubbles.

The hotness of the mining demand can be seen from the revenue status of the first- and second-tier traditional motherboard manufacturers. Gigabyte, HiSilicon, and Leadtek all achieved record revenue in January 2018. MSI, Biostar, and ASRock also achieved double-digit year-on-year revenue growth in January. Driven by the mining demand, the industry's revenue is booming.

MSI's consolidated revenue in January hit the second highest record in history. High-end graphics card shipments are booming. Due to the shortage of high-end graphics cards in the market, the company will work overtime to meet the demand during the Lunar New Year. In 2017, Gigabyte's graphics card business has raised its product average unit price (ASP) driven by mining demand.

It is expected that the overall mining demand will continue until the first quarter of 2018, and due to shortages and increased costs, the ASP will continue to rise, and the terminal price has increased by 5-10%. Although the visibility of board demand can be seen until April 2018, we still need to pay attention to the risks of mining disasters and virtual currency bubbles in the long term.

By Li Xinyi, TrendForce Research Institute