Intel Blockscale was a brand of crypto-mining accelerator

ASIC An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC ) is an integrated circuit (IC) chip customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use, such as a chip designed to run in a digital voice recorder or a high-efficien ...

sold by the U.S. chip manufacturer

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

. The Blockscale product debuted in June 2022, and was cancelled by Intel in April 2023. Intel has stated that it will continue to supply chips to existing customers until April 2024. The Blockscale chips were

SHA-256 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compressi ...

hardware accelerators designed for

proof-of-work Proof of work (also written as proof-of-work, an abbreviated PoW) is a form of Cryptography, cryptographic proof (truth), proof in which one party (the ''prover'') proves to others (the ''verifiers'') that a certain amount of a specific computatio ...

calculations. According to Intel, they were capable of up to 580 GH/s with a power consumption of up to 22.7 W, and a claimed efficiency of up to 26 J/TH. The product came in three variants: the Blockscale 1120, 1140, and 1160.

References

Intel products Hardware acceleration Cryptographic hardware Bitcoin 2022 establishments in the United States 2023 disestablishments in the United States {{crypto-stub