Crypto Has Crashed But Bitmain Unveils A Miner With The Power Of 25 RTX 3080 GPUs
Ethereum has fallen nearly 40 percent over the past month, and is down more than 76 percent from its all-time high. And there's also the delayed shift from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake model that will drastically affect the mining game for the world's largest altcoin. But like a mining honey badger, Bitmain doesn't give two flips about all that and has announced a powerful new mining ASIC anyway.
The new Antminer E9, as it's called, is a "long-awaited advanced Ethereum miner which enhances ETH/ETC mining operations under the Ethash algorithm." The bigger chest-thump, however, is the claim that it is capable of mining Ethereum at a 2,400 MH/s hashrate (plus or minus 10 percent). As Bitmain points out on Twitter, it would take 25 GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs to match the mining output of a single Antminer E9.
According to Bitmain, its latest miner consumers 1,920W of power, resulting in a power efficiency rating of 0.87 J/M. Pricing has been set at $9,999. If going by launch pricing, that's equivalent in cost to around 14 GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards.
“Bitmain is dedicated to continuously providing miners worldwide with high-performance, low-power, and energy-efficient products. After a long period of research and development, Antminer E9 offers miners with a high-performance ETH and ETC miner, which employs industry-leading hashrates”. Said Clark Du, vice president of Bitmain’s mining division.
Interestingly, when Bitmain first announced the Antminer E9 a few months ago, it touted a 3,000 MH/s hashrate, putting it roughly in line with 32 GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards, or 25 GeForce RTX 3090 cards. It's not clear why the specs have been toned down for the finished product that's now on sale.
In any event, it's here and it comes amid a widespread crash in the cryptocurrency market. That's not to say crypto won't recover. But for the time being, values of many of the top cryptocurrencies are way down from a short while ago. Undoubtedly not a coincidence, graphics cards are more widely available and closer to MSRP (sometimes even lower) than they have been in a long while.
