Samsung is moving briskly towards completing the development of its three nanometre (nm) foundry processing chip, that would be able to facilitate the mining of Bitcoin. The South Korean tech giant is reportedly ready to start the trial production of this special chip. These ‘application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs)’ chips are energy efficient hardware units, that can help make the process of Bitcoin mining less detrimental to the environment. The launch of Samsung’s AISC chip is already awaited by several tech players around the world.
As per reports, Chinese firm called PanSemi will be the first customer of Samsung’s to be purchasing these chips. PanSemi also designs ASICs to process BTC mining.
Samsung is making its chip as a ‘gate-all-around (GAA)’ offering. This essentially means that these chips will have current gates on all four surfaces, allowing more precise current control. This could increase the efficiency of BTC mining by 30 percent.
US-based chipmaker Qualcomm has also shown interest in taking advantage of Samsung’s ASIC chips, Bitcoin Magazine reported.
Samsung, with its upcoming offering, is set to give competition to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which also manufactures custom chips.
Samsung could add in more competition if it plans to create its own hardware, which it is financially capable of carrying out BTC mining.
In recent times, BTC’s proof-of-work (PoW) mining has garnered criticism in the industry.
In May, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried as dismissed Bitcoin as a viable payment network option. The chief of one of world’s most prominent crypto exchanges has said that Bitcoin’s energy consuming and expensive PoW mining takes it out of the race of becoming a widely adopted crypto payment option.
PoW mining needs a competitive validation method to confirm transactions and add new blocks to the blockchain. Hence, the operations of PoW mining are costlier to maintain.
Previously, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen had proposed Bitcoin miners to move away from the existing, energy-intensive PoW algorithm to the more energy-efficient PoS protocol.
Currently, the Ethereum blockchain is undergoing a revamp to switch it from PoW to the more energy efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) mining model.
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