Samsung is moving into the cryptomining business with production of ASIC chips

[midian182]

Now that Samsung has taken Intel’s title as the world’s biggest chipmaker, it’s decided to turn its eye toward the cryptocurrency market. The company is mass producing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) used to mine cryptos like bitcoin.

Korean site The Bell originally reported the news, citing unnamed Samsung officials. It claimed production was taking place in collaboration with an unnamed China-based mining equipment manufacturer, who will distribute the hardware.

"We are making progress with our foundry business that supplies to a virtual money mining company in China," a Samsung rep told the publication. "It is in the beginning stage so the proportion of profit from the overall foundry business is small yet."

Speaking to TechCrunch, a spokesperson confirmed the news. “Samsung’s foundry business is currently engaged in the manufacturing of cryptocurrency mining chips. However we are unable to disclose further details regarding our customers.”

Samsung is already working on its 10-nanometer 16Gb GDDR6 DRAM chips. They come with better power efficiency, are designed to increase a GPU’s performance, and are also used for mining purposes.

This isn’t the first time Samsung has shown an interest in cryptomining. Last October, it showed off a bitcoin mining cluster consisting of 40 Galaxy S5 handsets as part of its upcycling initiative.

Right now, Chinese company Bitmain is the industry leader when it comes to mining hardware. It claims to own over 70 percent of the market share. Both it and Canaan Creative use Taiwan-based company TSMC to manufacture their chips.

Samsung will compete against Bitmain's ASIC chip supplier. It will use its foundry in its semi-conductor plant to manufacture bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining equipment.

Important to note, Samsung has one of the largest semi-conductor plants. https://t.co/d6HMOgZAdM

— Joseph Young (@iamjosephyoung) January 30, 2018

TSMC has added $350 million to $400 million to its quarterly revenue thanks to crypto mining. Samsung said on an earnings call today that it expects its foundry arm to be "number two" in the business behind the Taiwanese giant.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/73040-samsung-moving-cryptomining-business-production-asic-chips.html

 

[davislane1]

TL;DR version:

If you want to get into GPU mining, do it now because Samsung is going to get into ASIC mining and difficulties for alt coins are going to exponentially increase once those products hit the market.

 

[G0DofPaiN]

TL;DR version:

If you want to get into GPU mining, do it now because Samsung is going to get into ASIC mining and difficulties for alt coins are going to exponentially increase once those products hit the market.

Well most people that use GPUs for mining are mining ASIC resistant coins and they won't be affected.

 

[davislane1]

Well most people that use GPUs for mining are mining ASIC resistant coins and they won't be affected.

Which in Samsung's eyes is an untapped market. ASIC-resistant is only ASIC-resistant until someone either a) makes an ASIC miner that solves this problem or b) makes a miner with another acronym. With billions of research dollars at their disposal, Samsung is much more capable than existing ASIC operations (that I know of) to do this.

Ergo, mine now before it's too expensive to mine later.

 

[yRaz]

Well most people that use GPUs for mining are mining ASIC resistant coins and they won't be affected.

Which in Samsung's eyes is an untapped market. ASIC-resistant is only ASIC-resistant until someone either a) makes an ASIC miner that solves this problem or b) makes a miner with another acronym. With billions of research dollars at their disposal, Samsung is much more capable than existing ASIC operations (that I know of) to do this.

Ergo, mine now before it's too expensive to mine later.

ASIC resistant means that they were designed to run most efficiently on GPU's. In this instance the GPU's are the ASICS. What don't people get about this?

 

[Rees]

Well most people that use GPUs for mining are mining ASIC resistant coins and they won't be affected.

Which in Samsung's eyes is an untapped market. ASIC-resistant is only ASIC-resistant until someone either a) makes an ASIC miner that solves this problem or b) makes a miner with another acronym. With billions of research dollars at their disposal, Samsung is much more capable than existing ASIC operations (that I know of) to do this.

Ergo, mine now before it's too expensive to mine later.

ASIC resistant means that they were designed to run most efficiently on GPU's. In this instance the GPU's are the ASICS. What don't people get about this?

The part were why is it alt coins using (Ethash or Equihash, and other algorithms [not SHA-256]) are ASIC resistant? It's because these algorithms are dependent on ram 'speed' in short. Current high-speed ram such as GDDR5, GDDR5x and HBM2 are in video cards and are generally not limited by the video cards gpu. This is what makes it ASIC resistant.

Now that Samsung is producing GDDR6 memory there might actually be a market for improved performance using less power. I'm also assuming Nvidia will be producing their next cards with GDDR6 where the speed of ASIC devices made by Samsung would be very similar to Nvidia's new cards per wattage used if both are using GDDR6.

 

[yRaz]

The part were why is it alt coins using (Ethash or Equihash, and other algorithms [not SHA-256]) are ASIC resistant? It's because these algorithms are dependent on ram 'speed' in short. Current high-speed ram such as GDDR5, GDDR5x and HBM2 are in video cards and are generally not limited by the video cards gpu. This is what makes it ASIC resistant.

Now that Samsung is producing GDDR6 memory there might actually be a market for improved performance using less power. I'm also assuming Nvidia will be producing their next cards with GDDR6 where the speed of ASIC devices made by Samsung would be very similar to Nvidia's new cards per wattage used if both are using GDDR6.

the part where these chips are dependant on ram speed is that the GPU can take advantage of the increased bandwidth. The reason overclocking the GPU doesn't always increase performance is that the GPU was never the bottleneck.

think of it this way, you know how we render graphics on GPU's instead of a CPU or some other "ASIC"? It's that rendering images works best on a GPU. People don't understand that the GPU is already and always has been an ASIC. It's an ASIC designed to render and process images. So what developers do is that they design their "ASIC" resistant algorithms to be something more like rendering an image.

 

[cliffordcooley]

What don't people get about this?

Maybe the whole concept of burning processing power for little to no return. Someone is benefiting and it is not the person that owns the machine. All the processing power is a total waste.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

ASIC are far more efficient at mining than GPU.

What STOCKS can I invest in to profit?

 

[yRaz]

Maybe the whole concept of burning processing power for little to no return. Someone is benefiting and it is not the person that owns the machine. All the processing power is a total waste.

Each of my 1080tis makes me almost $300 a month each. My 1070tis make me around $180 a month each. If you're saying that $2200 a month in passive income is little to no return then I want whatever job you have

 

[yRaz]

ASIC are far more efficient at mining than GPU.

What STOCKS can I invest in to profit?

ASICs are more efficient at mining SOME coins. And by some, I mean just 3 out of the some 1300 cryptos can be mined by ASICs. Bitcoin, Litecoin and DASH.

Other coins are designed so that they are processed like an image making GPUs(an ASIC in and of itself) the most efficient way to mine.

 

[davislane1]

Each of my 1080tis makes me almost $300 a month each. My 1070tis make me around $180 a month each. If you're saying that $2200 a month in passive income is little to no return then I want whatever job you have

No kidding. Using just a 1080ti and a 1070 I could pay the monthly note on a new car.

Easy money.

 

[yRaz]

No kidding. Using just a 1080ti and a 1070 I could pay the monthly note on a new car.

Easy money.

You have to switch what you mine ever so often to maximize profits but there are websites that help you didn't that. I started mining on 1080ti, it paid for itself so I bought another one. Ever since I've been buying 1-2 1070tis a month with what I make off of them. I'm just waiting for votla at this point before I buy anymore,.pricing is stupid. Should have enough saved up by then to be able to buy about 10 cards once it's released, lol. At that point I might actually quit my job. My long term goal is to make enough mining to buy rental properties

 

[davislane1]

You have to switch what you mine ever so often to maximize profits but there are websites that help you didn't that. I started mining on 1080ti, it paid for itself so I bought another one. Ever since I've been buying 1-2 1070tis a month with what I make off of them. I'm just waiting for votla at this point before I buy anymore,.pricing is stupid. Should have enough saved up by then to be able to buy about 10 cards once it's released, lol. At that point I might actually quit my job. My long term goal is to make enough mining to buy rental properties

Playing long ball here. Low cap mine and hold. Accumulate a few thousand coins and sell when/if they bubble up.

 

[ET3D]

think of it this way, you know how we render graphics on GPU's instead of a CPU or some other "ASIC"? It's that rendering images works best on a GPU.

And that's because GPU's were designed for graphics. GPU's weren't designed for crypto, which is why it's possible to create more efficient ASIC's that run crypto. There is no mining algorithm I'm familiar with which uses graphics features. Granted, I'm hardly familiar with all of them, but they typically come from CPU style algorithms and use the GPU as a compute machine, meaning that a decent percent of the GPU silicon goes to waste when mining.

 

[Anton Skryaga]

One example of ASIC-resistant algorithm is CryptoNight. It uses ~500000 AES iterations across 2Mb buffer in pseudorandom order per one solution. Modern ASIC can't be built with such amount of RAM.
CPU like 8core Xeon/Ryzen with 20-30Mb L3 cache does 500-600 sol/sec (~60 sol per core per sec). It's about $3 per day in current prices.
We can imagine some specific chip with hardware AES, many cores (1024?) and fast memory. Something like Xeon Phi on steroids

 

[trparky]

One example of ASIC-resistant algorithm is CryptoNight. It uses ~500000 AES iterations across 2Mb buffer in pseudorandom order per one solution. Modern ASIC can't be built with such amount of RAM.

Someone will and I'm going to say that Samsung will be the one to do it.

 

[gamerk2]

People, maybe you should at least understand the acronym for ASICs before calling yourselves experts:

ASIC: Application-specific integrated circuit

They are more efficient then GPUs when an ASIC is designed for a specific purpose. GPUs are good at doing a lot of tasks because they are fully programmable. ASICs by contrast need to be specially designed for the SPECIFIC task at hand, but are orders of magnitude faster at that task, as that is literally the ONLY thing they are designed to do.

 

[Stingy McDuck]

Is there some crazy conspiracy behind this bitcoin craze? Like, secretly and without knowing it, all these people have been performing calculations for a supercomputer (aliens, the patriots, skynet) so it can slave us all.

 

[davislane1]

Is there some crazy conspiracy behind this bitcoin craze? Like, secretly and without knowing it, all these people have been performing calculations for a supercomputer (aliens, the patriots, skynet) so it can slave us all.

Tom Brady is coming for you all. Release.... the Belichick.

 

[Stingy McDuck]

Tom Brady is coming for you all. Release.... the Belichick.

LOL, I meant 'The Patriots' from the Metal Gear series.

 

[davislane1]

LOL, I meant 'The Patriots' from the Metal Gear series.

Haven’t played much MG. Makes more sense now.

 

[QuantumPhysics]

No kidding. Using just a 1080ti and a 1070 I could pay the monthly note on a new car.

Easy money.

I'm amazed you earn that much considering the difficulty of processing crypto now, but if that's the case, you should build miners and sell them for profit.

 

[davislane1]

I'm amazed you earn that much considering the difficulty of processing crypto now, but if that's the case, you should build miners and sell them for profit.

I mine small cap altcoins to the tune of 100-120 coins awarded per month, depending on uptime. As long as they stay within a range of $2.00-$10.00 per coin, it's easy money. If you're mining the big ones the numbers are much lower because of the difficulty. For example, I briefly mined BTC and never received any payouts due to the difficulty.