Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining Patent Win By Intel

Global tech giant Intel, familiar for its widely-used pc processors, has won a patent connected to its work in the area of cryptocurrency mining.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark office awarded the company a patent outlining a processor that claims to be ready to conduct “energy-efficient high performance bitcoin mining,” specifically naming the SHA-256 algorithmic program used by the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

As reported, Intel has antecedently sought patents related to its work in the area of crypto mining. And it had been Intel’s foundry that produced the chips for the mining operation run by 21 inc, which later rebranded as Earn.com and was ultimately acquired by Coinbase.

Per the patent, bitcoin miners could also be rewarded for their efforts by receiving a block reward and transaction fees. However, mining machines for the bitcoin network usually need hardware accelerators, like application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and thus need a large quantity of energy.

Hardware accelerators are required specifically for processing 32-bit nonces, strings of bits used once during a transaction. Current ASICs method these transactions in multiple stages with redundancies.

As the patent explains:

"Dedicated Bitcoin mining ASICs are wont to implement multiple SHA-256 engines which will deliver a performance of thousands of hashes per second whereas consuming power of bigger than 200 [watts]. Embodiments of the current disclosure employ micro-architectural optimizations including selective hardwiring certain parameters in Bitcoin mining computation.”

Hardwiring these parameters would lower the number of computations needed, it says, estimating that such a system would cut back the quantity of power required for a chip by 15 %. The resulting chip would also be smaller than those used for bitcoin miners at present.

The patent also hints that changing how much of the 32-bit nonce is compared for validity might further lower power needs.

Instead of comparison the ultimate hashing result with the target value, [the] bitcoin mining application might confirm whether the hash out has a minimum number of leading zeros,” the patent states.