Bitmain has revealed a new liquid-cooled mining rig, the Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd, that's said to be capable of producing 198 terahashes per second (TH/s) of compute power so miners can keep pace with the increasing difficulty of earning Bitcoin.
Bitcoin.com said the Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd is nearly twice as powerful as the base Antminer S19 Pro, which boasts a 110 TH/s hashrate, and bests the 140 TH/s hashrate of the next-gen Antminer S19 XP that Bitmain expects to ship by October.
ANTMINER S19 Pro+ Hyd. has officially launched! Equipped with a hashrate of 198 TH/s, power consumption of 5445W, and power efficiency of 27.5 J/TH. The S19 Pro+ Hyd. operates with the latest liquid cooling technology. Enter a new era of liquid cooling. #BITMAIN #ANTMINER pic.twitter.com/fMpO3mD2cHJanuary 17, 2022
Bitcoin miners will need as much compute power as they can get. The difficulty of mining the cryptocurrency reached an all-time high this month, and with the global hashrate sitting at a record 199 TH/s, earning Bitcoin will only get harder.
The chain goes something like this: More difficult mining requires more powerful machines that will run at higher temperatures. Turning to liquid cooling for the Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd should allow Bitmain to balance all of those factors.
Not that Bitmain's the first to realize this. CleanSpark announced in December 2021 that it would dunk 5,940 of its Antminer S19j Pro rigs in "a synthetic hydrocarbon compound" to increase its hashrate and reduce its operating costs.
Bitmain said on its website that the Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd is expected to ship between May and September. The rig is supposed to be used with the Antspace HK3 container, which can hold up to 210 units, and is set to ship between March and July.
This equipment probably won't be cheap—especially since Bitmain said that "the minimum miner quantity will be 190 units"—but the company hasn't revealed official pricing. At the time of writing, both product pages simply say they are "coming soon."
That might be for the best. Bitcoin's value has fallen roughly 34 percent over the last month, so mining operations might not be looking to upgrade their setups despite the increasing difficulty of mining Bitcoin.
