Block, Argo and Griid Among First Buyers of Intel’s New Blockchain Accelerators

Intel is planning to release blockchain accelerators later this year and has lined up some big-name buyers, according to a blog post on Friday by Raja M. Koduri, a senior vice president.

Among its first customers for the accelerators, which help facilitate energy efficient crypto mining, are BLOCK (formerly Square), Argo Blockchain and the crypto mining startup Griid Infrastructure.

Koduri, who’s also general manager of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG), didn’t go into too much technical detail, but he did announce the formation of the Custom Compute Group, within AXG, “to build custom silicon platforms optimized for customers’ workloads, including blockchain and other custom accelerated supercomputing opportunities at the edge.”

Meanwhile, at Nvidia

Intel’s AXG unit isn’t the only graphics hardware specialist developing crypto mining technology. Driven by the popularity of the company’s graphics drivers being used in crypto mining rigs, Nvidia released a graphics card for Ethereum miners in February 2021: The Nvidia CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processor).

In the first three months of their release, Nvidia made $155 million from CMP cards. CEO Jensen Huang said last May: “CMP yields better, and producing those doesn’t take away from the supply of GeForce. So it protects supply for the gamers.”

With many gamers often facing hardware shortages as crypto miners snap up certain graphics cards, Nvidia announced early last summer it would cut the hash power of three of its most popular graphics cards to help keep them stocked up.