Comment Intel has begun shipping its cryptocurrency-mining “Blockscale” ASIC slightly ahead of schedule, and the timing could not be more unfortunate as digital currency values continue to plummet.
Raja Koduri, the head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics group, tweeted Wednesday the company has started initial shipments of the Blockscale ASIC to crypto-mining firms Argo Blockchain, Hive Blockchain and Griid:
Intel AXG Custom Compute team is now shipping the Blockscale ASIC! First product will always be unforgettable, congratulations team👍 Excited to see how @ArgoBlockchain @griid and @HiveBlockchain improvise around Blockscale and our open design. pic.twitter.com/0rxtNTLMfw
— Raja Koduri (Bali Makaradhwaja) (@RajaXg) June 29, 2022
Blockscale is shipping a couple days ahead of Intel’s previously stated release window for the third quarter, which begins Friday. Even if it’s a tiny head start, it is nonetheless an achievement for a corporation that is becoming notoriously under-schedule across multiple products, including the Sapphire Rapids server chips and the discrete Arc GPUs.
In this case, however, Intel is the victim of much larger forces beyond its control. The Blockscale ASIC – that’s Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, typically a chip designed to be good at a very particular task, such as facilitating blockchain transactions – is arriving at a time when many cryptocurrencies have been on the decline for the past few months.
