Remember Intel’s run at Bitcoin mining? In the span of a year that saw monkey JPEGs selling for six figures and Ethereum setting fire to GPUs, Intel quietly entered and exited the blockchain game. Its Blockcsale chips promised a clean, power-efficient future for Bitcoin mining. Then they vanished.
Now, those same chips are back. On September 2, nonprofit hardware collective 256 Foundation tweeted that it had received a delivery of 256,000 Intel BZM2 ASICs from Proto, the mining arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block, Inc., which previously pledged to offload leftover chips from its partnership with Intel. We spoke with the nonprofit for more details.
Intel’s abandoned mining silicon gets a second life
We covered the release of Blockscale and the Intel Bonanza Mine (BZM2) ASIC in detail back in 2022. Launched with a specialized architecture designed to specifically accelerate SHA-256 processing for Bitcoin mining at ultra-low voltage, the BZM2 was Intel’s second-generation chip of its kind.
At the time, Intel was courting industrial-scale miners with chip specs topping out at 580 GH/s and power efficiency of around 23 J/TH. Intel pitched the chip as a scalable building block, designed to be chained into 256-unit rigs capable of competing with Bitmain’s Antiminers. But the market moved fast, and Intel abruptly killed Blockscale a year later.
Now, two years after Intel pulled the plug on Blockscale, the chips are set to be repurposed for DIY rigs and open-hardware projects. According to 256 Foundation, the full batch represents roughly 76 PH/s of aggregate hash rate — assuming a conservative 0.3 TH/s per chip at 0.7 volts.
“We’ll be able to say more definitively what kinds of hash rate can be expected once we have some prototypes built and validated,” said 256’s founder, ‘Econalchemist,’ in an email to Tom’s Hardware. “At that voltage, the efficiency should be ~29 J/TH, with an output of ~0.3 TH/s.”
A hardware reset for open mining
Distribution is limited to four open-source hardware projects in the U.S., each receiving 54,000 chips. The recipients were selected from a small pool of developers who had reached out after the donation was first announced in January.
“Recipients had since January to express their interest,” Econalchemist said. “We had a total of four serious inquiries, and it was important to us that these chips be used to support open-source development.”
No official documentation was included in the donation, but one of the recipients is producing new open resources, including schematics and reference designs. 256 Foundation also plans to contribute its own open-source hardware alongside that effort. “Having these BZM2 chips is a big step toward the new era of innovation we see on the horizon,” said Econalchemist, “where end users get to inspect, modify, and run their hardware freely.”
The demand for these chips shows that there’s a clear want for change in how mining hardware is developed. Bitmain, which dominates the sector, has long operated a closed ecosystem with locked-down firmware and hardware designed to resist modification. The Foundation is hopeful that these chips will help move things in the opposite direction.
“Getting the BZM2 chips into the hands of open-source developers is a noteworthy milestone… this is a big step toward the new era of innovation we see on the horizon where end users get to inspect, modify, and run their hardware freely,” explains Econalchemist.
Not just for Bitcoin
The BZM2 is a purpose-built SHA-256 ASIC, but the chips could end up in a wider range of systems. According to Econalchemist, use cases include home heating, heating 3D printer beds, off-grid energy capture, and low-power infrastructure for overproducing solar and wind setups.
“One broad category is heat re-use,” says Econalchemist, “the heat generated from the mining chips can be reused for heating the air in homes and offices, heating the water in pools and hot tubs, or even for dehydrating food.”
Performance variance is expected. Not every chip will hit spec, and thermal design and power delivery will vary by project. But this is the first time in recent memory that a large volume of commercial-grade mining silicon has been released into public hands.
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