Samsung cryptocurrency mining chips called application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) will soon hit the market and change the way cryptocurrencies are being mined today.
Believe it or not but the Korean tech giant Samsung has given in to the cryptocurrency mining craze that companies are currently falling prey to and started developing processors specially designed to mine cryptocurrency. These chips are called application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).
We do know that Samsung’s memory chips are strongly in-demand as these are widely installed inside smartphones and in data centers, which is why Samsung reported a 24% increase in its fourth-quarter revenue year-over-year with a profit of 66 trillion won ($61 billion). Now, the company has stated that it is currently engaged in the production of cryptocurrency mining chips designed for single computational tasks.
Samsung has confirmed the new development to TechCrunch and let us not forget that Samsung is not just the producer of QLED 4K TVs and smartphones but it is the largest chipmaker in the world, much ahead than Intel. Therefore, the new set of chips might further solidify the position of Samsung in the silicon world.
This recent shift in production portfolio by Samsung might be surprising for many but it is a fact that the Korean tech firm has been involved in mining game since very long as most of the graphics cards used in the mining of cryptocurrency use high-capacity memory chips created by Samsung.
The company’s new venture will definitely pose serious competition to the Beijing based firm Bitmain, which is the current leader in the industry and controls nearly 30% of all the processing power of the Bitcoin network across the world via its two mining pools.
The edge that Samsung has over Bitmain is that it owns one of the world’s largest semiconductor plants and therefore, it can provide orders of any size while Bitmain lacks in this particular area.