Samsung is starting to produce Bitcoin mining chips

South Korean electric giant Samsung has reportedly started producing Asic chips for bitcoin mining. This gives the Chinese Asic smiths competition from South Korea.

Several South Korean magazines report that Samsung has already begun production of Asic chips and is targeting their sale by the end of January. The technology group is already under contract with a hitherto unnamed Chinese manufacturer of Asics in order to manufacture the chips for them as a so-called “foundry”.

Samsung has one of the largest and most advanced semiconductor factories in the world, even though the production volume is still a long way from the world’s largest foundry of TSMC, which recently hit the headlines that bitcoin mining is one of the growth drivers of semiconductor manufacturing. It is striking that Samsung’s Foundry is already able to produce 10 or even 8 nanometer small chips and plans for 2018 series production of 7nm chips. With Bitmain’s most up-to-date bitcoin miners, the S9, still relying on 16nm chips, the foundry factories could trigger a new performance boost for the mining industry. Whether Bitmain itself is still the unknown mining manufacturer, and thus its market power will continue to expand, or whether another company, such as the makers of the Dragonmint Miners, with Samsung chip maker Bitmain competition – this is currently still in the stars.

The production of Bitcoin-Asic chips is the most decided step of the South Korean technology group towards cryptocurrencies. However, not the first: Already in the fall of 2017, the company has demonstrated that you can turn old Samsung smartphones into a mining rig. Some Samsung engineers have demonstrated how to recycle 40 S5 smartphones in such a way that the devices mine cryptocurrencies. At this time, Samsung has also announced that it will supply the Russian mining manufacturer Baikal with Asic chips. Unlike Bitmain, Baikal specializes in Asics, which do not generate bitcoins but coins with other algorithms like X11 or Blake.

In addition to the Asics Samsung already earned by DRAM for graphics cards in the mining boom. The company has begun mass-producing 16GB DRAM chips (GDDR6) with a size of 10nm. This memory is twice as fast as the previous GDDR5 chips. Graphics cards that want to keep up in the mining gold rush, these need exclusively manufactured by Samsung chips.

In addition to Samsung and TSMC, a third technology giant from Asia is currently penetrating into bitcoin mining: The leading Japanese Internet corporation GMO announced in September 2017 that it would produce 7nm Asic chips in order to build a large mining farm in To operate Northern Europe. Thus, there should be a race in the next few years, who exhausted Moores Law in Bitcoin mining first, by driving the Asic chips to the physical minimum. It could also be said that bitcoin mining has become a technological ode to the hash algorithm SHA256.