Bitmain Announces Next-Generation SHA-256 Antminer Chips

Bitmain, one of the largest cryptocurrency mining ASIC manufacturing companies, announced on Sept. 21 the release of new SHA-256 mining rigs at the World Digital Mining Summit in Georgia.

Bitmain's most recent SHA-256 ASIC is the Antminer S9 and is capable of mining Bitcoin at around 13.5 TH/s. While no hash rate estimation has been given yet for the new chip, Wu claims the chips energy consumption ratio is as low as 42J/T. The chip will also feature over a billion transistors for maximum efficiency.

Obviously, the Bitcoin network doesn't only have ASICs mining on it, but this provides an interesting estimation of just how much computing power is going towards securing Bitcoin.

One of the largest issues people have with ASICs is that they are so much more expensive than GPU's giving dedicated mining setups huge advantages over the everyday miner.

To most people this may seem like a big deal and good news, but actually the announcement shows things aren't looking too good for Bitmain.

BitmainIPO. - Samson Mow September 21, 2018.TL;DR: Bitmain announced their new 7nm chip which isn't that impressive.

Efficiency of the miner isn't going to be close to 42J/TH & it's going to be expensive to produce.

Oh, and Ebang is going to announce their new miner tomorrow.

No matter what side you are on, the release of new mining chips helps the network overall by reducing prices and encouraging new development.

There is no official release date for the new Antminers yet, except that they will be out "Soon" and in the next batch of miners.