Bitmain To Release Ethereum ASIC Miner - The Antminer F3
Dear Steemit Friends,
In a time when cryptocurrencies are becoming more mainstream and a more lucrative form of income for individuals all around the world, it's no surprise that technology continues to advance at a lightning-fast rate. For several of us, our journey started in the cryptocurrency space in the form of mining. Some of us started with GPUs and continued on as technology advanced and ASICs were developed. In an effort to curb this trend, newer cryptocurrencies that were supposedly ASIC-resistant were developed.
Bitmain has been consistently in the lead of ASIC development and ahead of all competition when it came to price vs hashrate and faster to market than any other manufacturer to date.
A new rumor has it that Bitmain will soon launch a new piece of hardware for electronic currency mining on a new platform that would be GPU-based to mine Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum miners are building rigs equipped with several GPUs to mine the ETH currency. This has made the cost of GPUs skyrocket and has impacted the overall availability of most gaming GPUs. This may soon be an issue of the past. Ethereum is (or was) designed to be ASIC proof, however, Charlie Lee said it best:
According to the Chinese website Technews, Bitmain is about to release an Ethereum ASIC miner tentatively identified as the Antminer F3. The rumored release date is Q2 or Q3 of 2018, which puts its release within the next few months. This comes at a time when Ethereum is speculated to switch to PoS eventually. With the price and marketcap of ETH speculated to overcome Bitcoin this year, I assume this is Bitmain's move to get in quick and make a ton of money before the switch to PoS happens and the price begins to skyrocket to the moon.
Potential Layout of the Boards - Image Source
The rumored specs of the F3 Ethereum miner indicate that every miner is mounted with 3 mainboards. Each mainboard will have 6 ASIC processors, each of which has 32 1GB DDR3 memory chips. This makes for a very powerful miner and with the lower power consumption expected from Bitmain products, would essentially put all other homemade GPU Mining rigs out of business.
Whether the rumors are true or not will have to be seen. It has been reported that Bitmain has been meeting with various plants and manufacturers in Taiwan to determine whether the needed amount of chips can be produced at the capacity that Bitmain is looking for. In a time where GPUs are in high demand and production is constantly struggling to meet demand, this may be a tall order.
The Dram memory demand that these plants need to fulfill for Bitmain is around 3,000 pieces of 12-inch wafers per month and it's expected that the ETH ASIC chips will begin production sometime this month. Previous rumors speculated that the ASICs could reach 200 to 220 Mhash per second, but with the current specs, the hashrate could possibly be even more. Late last year, it was speculated that the miner could come in two flavors - one with a power supply and one without a power supply, however, I assume Bitmain will follow it's current trend of shipping the miner and a separate power supply as individual products.
When it comes to price, I expect the miner to fall in the range of $2500 - $3000 as this is the typical range Bitmain tends to follow. The demand and overall growing value of Ethereum may even increase that estimate.
Bitmain is well known for getting in at the right time and helping to boost the value of a currency by releasing miners for a currency that has a growing demand. The company is well known for doing whatever it can as early as it can to grab a piece of the market. If the hype is true, I will be one of the first in line to try and get my hands on a couple of these miners.
What are your thoughts? Do you think the rumors are true? Let me know in the comments section below and If you do have any questions, inputs, or feedback, please also share those with me. I would also appreciate support in the form of Upvoting and Re-steeming my post if you found it informative
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That's very interesting. I wonder how soon this will make GPU switch to mining something else and what will be the best coin to mine for them. I think it would be Monero and that would be great for it's price I think.
Yes, I think many GPU miners will move over to Monero (especially considering the hardline anti-ASIC stance they're taking.)
Monero needs to create an easier to use wallet
Yes it does! That's why I've supported the development of both Cake Wallet and Monerujo (user-friendly iOS and Android wallets.) I suggest you try them out; they're much simpler than the desktop GUI. :)
I'll have to check those out. Thanks for the heads up!
@kop2 looks like you finally got the recognition from electroneum that you’ve been deserving!!! 👏
I agree. I think initially everyone will try to mine as much ETH as they can and when the difficulty starts to increase, people will switch over to Monero or ZCash. All the GPU mining currencies should see a nice little uplift - that is unless Bitmain does what they did with the A3s and locks it to ETH.
This is not an ASIC, it is just a huge collection of cheap memory chips. The current RX 580 8GB Sapphire Nitro + Special edition are able to produce 31 MH\s for as little as 85 watt. Of course having a modded BIOS and other twerks. Such GPUs out perform this miner in EVERY aspect. If you think otherwise, let me know...
Ughh! Good post, but dang. SatoshiLite is a good follow, but I'm not sure I can agree on this one. No surprise though from Bitmain. They like (and are good at) the alpha position. I'm sure it will be a money maker for them. Not sure what it will do for Ether. I suspect it will push the price higher, but Sia is keeping me in check on assuming too much.
ETH has a good head start. I think this year is definately up for grabs. These will definately be a money maker for Bitmain, especially because it is for Ethereum. ETH will surely get an uplift in price when/if these come out.
I think you are right about ETH. What will be really interesting to see is how the increased hash rate impacts other Ethash coins that aren't as well established. It could be a bumpy ride for a few. With more eyes on the algo, I hope we see a few more unique and value added coins enter the fray.
Never know. There are plenty of GPU mineable coins. If Bitmain doesn't lock the miner down to ETH, we could see an interesting increase in the overall network hashrate for a number of currencies.
Amazing and very interessing post thank you for sharing @cloh . i like your post to much.
Thanks @jimmyblack. Hopefully we will see an ETH miner soon that I can review
Lots of smoke and mirrors coming out of bitmain.. It's not going to be an ASIC it's just a specialized GPU Rig for mining.. Some preliminary calculations have it hashing around 600-650Mhz and power consumption in the low 1000 watt range.. Not sure about price tag..
That's good to know. I'm expecting a $2500-$3000 price tag. That seems to be their sweet spot when it comes to pricing.
The A3 was selling for $950 last time I checked.
This all assumes the Ethereum Foundation won't just modify ethash to be resistant. They might be able to do that even if bitmain is just stacking gpu's. It's never a done deal. Cryptos are evolving systems. I'd love to watch bitmain ship a few thousand only to have ethash modified in a way that no firmware update could fix. 1gb ram per gpu might be an easy target since gpu's used now have at least 4gb. Just quadrupling the ram usage might render their asic worthless and keep eth distributed.
I have heard that it may be just a bunch of GPU chips stacked into an enclosure. Samsung and intel are also now getting into the ASIC game!
The ASICs is more efficient hash per watt but their use drives the difficulty up (driving GPUs out) and the profitablity tanks.
ASICs are in no way more power efficient. No one has ever been "wow Bitcoin is so power efficient now".
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No!
When and if there is a asic miner for ethereum, it will definetely inflate its the price further. When all the coins finally get an asic, then it will be time to choose a side. A centralized government fiat currency or a centralized private entity crypto currency.
Decentralization let's everyone participate and earn incentives regardless rich, poor or average. Centralization let's only the rich and the powerful with connections and able to afford asic participate and creates monopoly.