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In recent years, digital virtual currencies represented by Bitcoin have been extremely popular. Especially this year, Bitcoin has risen more rapidly, once breaking through 20,000 US dollars, and other virtual currencies have also followed suit. At the same time, hardware manufacturers that provide "mining machines" for producing virtual currencies are also making a lot of money. For "mining machines", there are currently graphics cards used for mining, and there are also many manufacturers that provide mining machines based on dedicated ASIC chips. Among them, Beijing Bitmain Technology Co., Ltd. (Bitmain) is such a representative mining machine provider, and it is also the world's largest Bitcoin mining machine manufacturer.
Second only to Huawei HiSilicon! Bitmain has become China's second largest integrated circuit design company. According to information, Bitmain was founded in 2013 by Wu Jihan and chip design expert Micree Zhan. It is a startup company that produces Bitcoin mining machines, customized chips, and operates "mining pools" (Bitcoin miner factories).
After several years of development, Bitmain now has more than 700 employees. In addition to its Beijing headquarters, it also has R&D centers in Chengdu, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Wuhan, etc. At the same time, it has branches in Hong Kong, California, Tel Aviv, Israel, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, etc. Its business has involved all aspects of Bitcoin production and has become the world's largest Bitcoin mining machine manufacturer. In addition, Bitmain is also expanding its artificial intelligence hardware and software products, developing deep learning acceleration cards and servers, deep learning cloud platforms and other series of products and services.
Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu said that Bitmain already has more than 70% of the market share of Bitcoin mining machines, effectively providing 70% of all processing power on the network. According to Wang Jun, head of Bitmain's deep learning chip project, "Bitmain can sell hundreds of thousands of AntMiners every year, and mining machines are the company's main source of income." With the surge in Bitcoin this year, Bitmain's mining machine shipments have soared, and have been in short supply.
From Bitmain's official website, we can see that all its Antminers are priced at more than 10,000 yuan, and all are "sold out". It seems that Bitmain's business is extremely hot this year. In addition to selling "mining machines", Bitmain also owns two mining pools (Bitcoin mining plants), Antpool and BTC.com, which provide Bitcoin cloud mining and cloud mining machine hosting/agent services. According to Wu Jihan, the two mining pools, Antpool and BTC.com, currently account for 28.9% of the global Bitcoin network processing capacity. Antpool ranks first in the world in terms of mining power, and BTC.com ranks third in the world. ▲Bitmain's Bitcoin "mine" in Ordos, Inner Mongolia. According to Wu Jihan, the mineral resources in Ordos can generate about $250,000 in revenue per day (value in September this year), and he also plans to invest $200 million to build a new mine in the United States.
What is more worth mentioning is that Bitmain has designed dedicated ASIC chips for Bitcoin computing since the first generation of its mining machine Antminer S1. Its current ASIC chip production processes cover 28nm, 16nm, 12nm, and even the latest ASIC chip is preparing to use 10nm.
The current Antminer S9 is equipped with up to 189 BM1387, the fifth-generation Bitcoin mining chip independently developed by Bitmain. It is based on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process and uses a fully customized design. The computing power of a single chip can reach 74GH/S, and the power consumption is only 0.08W/GH/s at a core voltage of 0.4V. It is said to be the computing chip with the lowest power consumption and the highest energy efficiency in the history of Bitcoin chips. It is said that the mass production scale of this chip has reached billions (in addition to the mining machines sold to the outside world, Bitmain also has two mining pools operated by itself that consume a large number of mining machines, and one mining machine uses nearly 200 chips).
According to information from the supply chain, in December this year, Bitmain's latest ASIC chip order was placed with TSMC's 10nm process. It is said that the order volume has even exceeded Huawei HiSilicon's Kirin 970 processor.
Therefore, it can be said that Bitmain is also an IC design company. According to industry experts, Bitmain's monthly profit in 2017 was 200 million yuan, and its net profit in the first half of the year exceeded 1 billion yuan. Of course, IC design only contributed a part of the profit, but it certainly accounted for a large proportion. According to ICWise, Bitmain's sales in 2017 will reach a staggering 14.3 billion yuan, surpassing the domestic mobile phone chip design company Spreadtrum and ranking second in the 2017 list of China's top ten integrated circuit design companies, second only to Huawei HiSilicon.
In just about 5 years, Bitmain, a "part-time" IC design company with independent origins, has surpassed many established IC design companies with more than ten years of history. The rapid rise of Bitmain is truly amazing.
The rise of Bitmain <br/>Back in 2009, Wu Jihan graduated from Peking University with a double degree in economics and psychology. He then began working as an investment analyst and investment manager for a private equity fund of funds. Thanks to his major and previous investment work experience, in 2011, after Wu Jihan came into contact with Bitcoin, he converted all his assets into Bitcoin with his keen investment sense. At the same time, he began to participate in the Bitcoin community and became the co-founder of 8btc.com, an important media in the Chinese Bitcoin community.
Wu Jihan invested in Bitcoin, which soon earned him his first pot of gold. But he was not satisfied with Bitcoin investment, he wanted to make a more efficient "mining machine". The key to the performance of a "mining machine" lies in the chip. So Wu Jihan found Zhan Ketuan, whom he had met in 2010, and hoped that he, who graduated from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and had experience in chip design, could design an ASIC chip that could run SHA-256 (used for Bitcoin encryption calculations) with the highest efficiency. Zhan Ketuan recalled: "I spent two hours reading about Bitcoin on Wikipedia, and I realized that Bitcoin has development potential, so I decided to join without hesitation."
Although this task seemed very difficult to Zhan Ketuan at first, and he often complained that it was impossible, Zhan Ketuan, then 38 years old, completed the task in just half a year. (Note from Xinzhixun: The chip should have been customized based on other chips at that time.)
In November 2013, the first mining machine designed by Zhan Ketuan, Antminer S1, was finally launched, and Bitmain officially opened for business. "In 2014, our performance soared throughout the year," said Wu Jihan. In fact, Bitcoin reached a historical high of nearly $1,200 in November 2013, and then the world's largest trading center Mt. Gox in Japan had a fraud incident, and then Bitcoin began to collapse.
As the price of Bitcoin fell, the enthusiasm of "miners" was greatly dampened, and the sales of mining machines naturally fell sharply. At the end of 2014, Bitmain entered its most difficult time. If the price of Bitcoin continued to fall, Bitmain would probably go bankrupt.
Fortunately, as the blockchain technology behind Bitcoin gradually gained attention in the industry, the value of Bitcoin also began to rise. At the same time, Zhan Ketuan successfully developed the fifth-generation mining machine Antminer S5, which uses the self-designed BM1384 chip. The power consumption of the new generation of mining machines is reduced by 1/3 compared with the first generation of mining machines. Thanks to its excellent energy efficiency performance, Antminer S5 quickly became a popular mining machine.
"That chip is amazing," Wu Jihan said, "it brought our company back to life." After that, Bitmain began to increase its investment in chips. The current Antminer S9 is equipped with 189 BM1387, the fifth generation Bitcoin mining chip independently developed by Bitmain. Based on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process and using a fully customized design, the computing power of a single chip can reach 74GH/S, and the power consumption is only 0.08W/GH/s at a core voltage of 0.4V. It is said to be the chip with the lowest power consumption in the history of Bitcoin chips.
Thanks to its early entry into the mining machine market and its independence in core technology, Bitmain's mining machines have been able to rise rapidly in the market competition.
Market competition is becoming increasingly fierce <br/>In fact, long before Bitmain launched its own ASIC chips, some ASIC chip manufacturers had already launched some ASIC chips for Bitcoin. Now, Bitmain’s main competitors basically have their own ASIC chips for mining machines.
Founded in 2013, Canaan Creative claims to be the world's first company to develop SHA256-specific computing equipment. Its equipment has been sold to more than 30 countries and regions around the world, accounting for 30% of the world's dedicated equipment in the field of repeated computing. Canaan Creative has received 300 million RMB (about 43 million USD) in Series A financing, and the company is currently valued at 3 billion RMB (about 430 million USD). Avalon A721 mining machine is a high-computing bitcoin mining machine launched by Canaan Creative in the early days. The bitcoin mining machine used 72 customized Avalon (Avalon mining machine) sixth-generation bitcoin mining machine A3212 chips at the time, based on the 16nm process. The official parameters of the mining machine are 6TH/S computing power and 900W power consumption. The latest Avalon Miner 821 mining machine is equipped with 104 new-generation ASIC chips. It is said that the ability of its mining machine to process Bitcoin hash functions is a thousand times faster than that of computer GPUs.
BitFury is the world's second largest "mining" equipment manufacturer and the world's leading Bitcoin blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company. As early as 2015, BitFury had mass-produced its fully customized 16nm ASIC chip dedicated to Bitcoin computing.
BitFury was founded in Russia in 2011 and is headquartered in Belgium. It has management offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam, and data centers in Iceland and the Republic of Georgia. In the early days, it was an ASIC Bitcoin mining chip R&D team, and now it has transformed into blockchain basic data services and transaction processing services.
ASICMiner was founded in June 2012. As the earliest team to try to achieve hash calculations through ASIC chip technology to obtain Bitcoin, it achieved unprecedented success in the early stages of its business. The founder "Baomao" announced the IPO and established ASICMINER in the Bitcoin Forum in August 2012. A total of 400,000 shares were issued, of which 163,962 shares were held by the public, and 236,038 shares were held by Shenzhen Stock Exchange Bitfountain Company (Bitfountain), with an original share of 0.01BTC per share. Since its establishment, the company has focused on the research and development, sales and computing power deployment of SHA-256 dedicated chips and Bitcoin mining machine products. The current focus is still on core technologies such as chip technology, control technology, and board-level design technology.
Zhejiang Ebang Communication Technology Co., Ltd. is also a manufacturer of Bitcoin mining machines. In December 2016, it released a high-computing Bitcoin mining machine, the Ebit E9. This mining machine was first launched and built with 96 Ebang Communication's self-developed Bitcoin mining chips WD1227. Based on the 14nm process, the whole machine has a computing power of 6.3TH/S and an energy consumption ratio of 140W/T. This year's E9 increases the number of chips and increases the computing power to 9TH/s.
Butterfly Labs was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Kansas, USA. It is a company that specializes in producing ASIC-based Bitcoin mining machines. It sold about 2,300 slower FPGA mining machines between 2011 and 2012, and announced the sale of faster ASIC mining machines in June 2012, with the lowest price of 5 GH/s mining machines being $274 and the highest price of 500 GH/s being $22,484.
In addition to the above, there are many similar manufacturers. As we can see, with the popularity of Bitcoin, there are more and more competitors in the mining machine market, and these competitors also use their own ASCI chips. At the same time, these competitors have also improved chip manufacturing processes to improve performance and reduce power consumption. According to a recent report by Korean media, Samsung Electronics has signed a contract with Baikal, a Russian Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer, and will use the advanced 14nm process to produce ASIC chips for Baikal's mining machines.
Layout of artificial intelligence <br/>As artificial intelligence has become increasingly popular in recent years, the market demand for artificial intelligence chips has also been rising. For this reason, Bitmain has also launched its own artificial intelligence chip. On November 8, 2017, at the AI WORLD 2017 World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Beijing, Bitmain co-founder and CEO Zhan Ketuan officially launched Bitmain's AI brand SOPHON (the Chinese brand name is Suanfeng, which means "calculating the universe and enriching cognitive intelligence". It comes from the famous science fiction novel "The Three-Body Problem") and the world's first self-developed tensor acceleration computing chip (TPU) - BM1680. According to the information, BM1680 is a dedicated custom chip for tensor computing acceleration processing for deep learning applications. It is suitable for reasoning, prediction and training of deep neural networks such as CNN, RNN, and DNN. The chip consists of 64 NPU units, and the specially designed NPU scheduling engine can provide powerful data throughput and input data into the neuron core. A single chip can provide 2TFlops single-precision accelerated computing capability. BM1680 adopts an improved systolic array structure. The on-chip 32MB SRAM has high bandwidth, and there is a DDR4 memory interface outside the chip. A single chip can support up to 16GB DDR memory.
In addition, through the highly customized BMDNN Chiplink chip link technology, a stable, flexible, and low-latency link is provided on the high-speed SerDes, which enables multiple BM1680 chips to work together as a unified system to provide higher processing capabilities. BM1680 chip architecture diagram (from BM1680 DATASHEET document)
In addition, Bitmain also launched heavyweight products such as the BM1680-based board SC1/SC1+ and the X86-based intelligent video analysis server SS1. Based on these products, Bitmain demonstrated technologies such as video image analysis and face and body detection. Zhan Ketuan also announced that these products have begun mass production and shipment.
It was also revealed that based on the first-generation artificial intelligence product chip BM1680, Bitmain will also launch the third-generation SOPHON BM series products based on the 12nm FinFET process in 2018, and is expected to launch the fourth-generation products in 2019.
Zhan Ketuan said: "Entering the field of artificial intelligence is an important step for BITMAIN. From developing digital currency chips and mining machines to setting up mining pools, Bitmain has independently developed and independently laid out a complete industrial chain. Now is the best time for BITMAIN to enter the artificial intelligence industry. BITMAIN is committed to providing the most cost-effective and most performance-to-power ratio AI computing power through powerful chip engineering, rapid iteration and system design and manufacturing capabilities. At the same time, it is committed to customizing and optimizing full-stack hardware and system solutions for the industry, thereby greatly reducing the difficulty of industry + AI and promoting the popularization of AI."
summary:
Bitmain, which was started by two people, has grown rapidly from a small company selling "mining machines" to the second largest integrated circuit design manufacturer in China after HiSilicon in just about 5 years. It has to be said that this is a miracle. Of course, Bitmain's success is also due to the continued surge in Bitcoin (Bitcoin has increased millions of times in the 8 years since 2010). However, with the continuous decline in the total production speed of Bitcoin (the output will be reduced by half every 4 years), and the continuous increase in the cost of improving chip computing power and reducing power consumption, the cost of mining Bitcoin is constantly increasing. If the price of Bitcoin cannot continue to grow, then the business of mining machines and mining pools will become unsustainable. Bitmain's choice to transform into artificial intelligence at this time is a very good choice. The advantage of Bitmain is that its ASIC acceleration chip used for Bitcoin computing has many similarities with artificial intelligence chips. At the same time, Bitmain also has rich chip mass production experience that other start-up artificial intelligence chip manufacturers do not have.
Author: Core Intelligence - Rurouni Sword |
