Intel thinks it's cracked energy efficiency with its blockchain chip

Since the start of the year, and indeed since Meta announced that it was working on a metaverse, the conversation surrounding Web3 has reached fever pitch.

There has been much talk about investment, but on Friday Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group, Raja Koduri detailed Intel’s plans for a blockchain focused chip.

“We are mindful that some blockchains require an enormous amount of computing power, which unfortunately translates to an immense amount of energy. Our customers are asking for scalable and sustainable solutions, which is why we are focusing our efforts on realizing the full potential of blockchain by developing the most energy-efficient computing technologies at scale,” wrote Koduri.

As an example, the Bitcoin network consumes approximately 125.13TWh per year. That’s higher than the energy consumption of Ukraine according to data from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. That is just one network and the energy consumption of blockchain based solutions is only going to grow.

Intel calls its solution to this problem a blockchain accelerator and it claims that through its innovations, its solution is 1 000 times more efficient than mainstream GPUs for SHAD-256 based mining.