Despite the fact that many companies involved in the mining industry are going through hard times and are forced, like Bitmain, to close branches around the world and suffer serious losses, there are companies that have weathered the main stage of the mining crisis and are preparing to present their developments in the field of cryptocurrency mining in 2019.


In March 2018, Intel reported that it was conducting developments in the field of mining, and in December the company officially received a patent for its device, which combines a hardware mining accelerator, a processor and optimized software. The US Patent and Trademark Office issued the relevant documents, since the device has every basis for them. Recall that to obtain a patent, equipment must be an invention, possess novelty and industrial applicability. This is important, because Intel has become a company that, with its innovation, will introduce a fundamentally new device into mining in 2019.

CPU mining will not gain a second wind, although the developed method of accelerating cryptocurrency mining will work in combination with ASIC, FPGA, CPU or even SoCs network protocols. Intel's accelerator will combine a software upgrade for hash computation and a hardware device.

Intel's software novelty consists in optimizing sensitive paths in solving hash functions. Thanks to the optimization, additional time will appear for scaling the power supply voltage and reducing the equipment's switching capacity. As a result, the combinational power in hash searching will be increased by 35%. Simply put, selective binding of parameters will take place to simplify the repetition of calculations.

With a bitcoin rate below $3500, the profitability of cryptocurrency mining in 2019 directly depends on the number of miners in the network that determine the overall hashrate. Bitcoin's hashrate grew until November 2018, then unprofitable miners were forced to disconnect and the hashrate fell. Intel's accelerator will allow previously disconnected miners to get back in the game, raising the total computing power of all cryptocurrency networks with the SHA-256 algorithm.

Intel has long been making attempts to enter the crypto industry. Almost a year ago, an agreement was concluded with PokitDok for the joint development of blockchain software aimed at the healthcare sector. Back in 2017, cooperation began with the large technology company Tencent, within the framework of which the development of blockchain solutions for IoT was planned. In the autumn of 2018, a partnership agreement was concluded with Ledger for the integration of the BOLOS Ledger OS and Intel's Software Guard Extensions.



AMD decided to change its strategy for producing mining equipment. In 2019, engineers will work on designing ready-made GPU farms, and there is a reason for this. AMD's annual revenue report states that the company tried to sell off graphics cards in the last quarter of 2018, but this did not fully succeed. In the first quarter of 2019, revenue is forecast to drop by up to 12%, and in the year-ahead outlook revenue is expected to fall by as much as 24%. Old graphics cards need to be sold off faster to bring devices based on the 7-nm process (in particular, AMD Radeon VII) to market sooner.

Where to put the remaining graphics cards if demand for them has dropped many times over, and it is more profitable for miners to stock up on Avito? It is precisely for this purpose that graphics cards like the Radeon RX 470 will be combined into a single AMD mining farm.

As we can see, AMD remains in the mining market, unlike Nvidia. Sapphire Technology also has high hopes for sales of mining graphics cards in 2019. For this purpose, a headquarters was opened in Hong Kong. The ready-made SAPPHIRE farm combines the power of 7 RX 470 graphics cards with two graphics chips (a dual-head graphics card with the Polaris architecture), the Linux OS and the INCA CS-14 block counting system with installed mining software. The official AMD website reports that the rig variants will also be assembled in builds from ASUS, ASROCK, MSI, TUL, ELIOVP, Rajintek and Biostar.



Samsung Foundry, which is a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, began producing the Power Plus (7LPP) chip with a 7-nm process at the beginning of the year. In the device's press release, the main advantage of Power Plus was announced ‒ a 50% reduction in energy consumption.

The advanced process is based on extreme ultraviolet lithography, which makes it possible to increase the number of transistors per unit area while simultaneously reducing power consumption. As South Korean engineers report, Power Plus 7LPP will become the base model for research on a 3-nm process. Samsung hopes that 7LPP will help achieve success in the fields of artificial intelligence, 5G, automotive manufacturing, IoT and cryptocurrency mining. At the moment, the company has not announced who has concluded contracts for the supply of the new chips. It is likely to be HalongMining or Squire Mining Limited.


The crypto industry is currently experiencing a crisis, so to make a profit miners need to take into account the trends of the cryptocurrency market in 2019. Therefore, despite the fact that the relevance of mining in 2019 remains low, Bitmain's competitors continue their developments. Even GMO, which had already stopped producing ASICs, has returned to the market with the B3 miner. The engineers of Innosilicon surprised everyone the most, presenting the T2 Turbo bitcoin mining ASIC with a hashrate of 32 Th/s, and BitFury with its flagship Bitfury Tardis with a hashrate of 80 Th/s.

The main manufacturer of ASIC miners continues to go through a prolonged rough patch, as evidenced by the price reduction of the Antminer S15 from $1500 to $1000 in just 2 months. This time Bitmain is forced to sharply reduce prices, unlike the previous 4 years, since for the first time in a long while competitors have provided serious competition in the mining equipment market.