Bitmain announces the development of a new 7nm ASIC chip and lower energy consumption

This new chip offers contemplates the consumption of about 30 J / T and will be integrated into the new mining hardware S17 and T17.

Bitmain, the company that manufactures hardware for crypto-mining, announced the development of a new 7-nanometer chip, which offers greater efficiency by reducing energy costs compared to previously manufactured devices.

According to recently published reports, the new ASIC called BM1397 offers significant improvements in performance, making mining much more profitable through the Proof-of-Work algorithm for currencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

Technical specifications

Among the technical specifications, the company indicates that the new 7nm chip was developed using a FinFET process, and its performance is very good since it offers a relationship of energy consumption - processing power of about 30 J / T.

In this regard, the company commented:

This new development offers a 28.6% improvement in energy consumption compared to the previously developed 7nm chip, the BM1391. To achieve this, the Bitmain engineering team completely customized the design of the chip to optimize its architecture, circuits and economy.

The new ASIC will be included in the new Antminer devices (S17 and T17), which Bitmain said will provide details later.

This new announcement comes shortly after the company indicated that the latest Antminers launched in November 2018, the S15 and the T15, integrated the ASIC chip BM1391.

Mining ZCash and Ethereum
In 2018, Bitmain also launched ASIC mining devices to operate with the ZCash and Ethereum protocols. This led to the Ethereum community voting to implement a new consensus algorithm called ProgPoW, with which it is not possible to do mining through mining hardware of this type.

However, ProgPow currently experiences certain delays due to differences present within the team of programmers, who are waiting for a new external audit that provides more data in relation to the efficiency of the algorithm.