Bitmain hints at hash rate specification of upcoming Ethereum ASIC miner

Bitmain, the Beijing-based mining hardware giant, has hinted that its upcoming Ethereum ASIC miner could outperform all rival products currently on the market.

The firm announced on Friday that it would launch its AntMiner E9 soon but did not provide specific details of the equipment's tech specification.

In a tweet on Sunday, Bitmain claimed the new Ethereum ASIC miner would be "a game changer" and added the hash rate of one AntMiner E9 is equivalent to 32 Nvidia  3080 GPUs.

According to miner profitability tracked by F2Pool and Poolin, 8 Nvidia's 3080 cards jointly deliver 760 megahashes per second (MH/s) of computing power. At Ethereum's current price and network difficulty, they are able to mine 0.04331290 ETH, worth around $90 as of writing, as daily revenue. 

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Bitmain's claim would mean its AntMiner E9 can compute at roughly 3,040 MH/s, which, if tested and proven when it actually hits the market, would outperform rival products by more than 3x.

That said, Bitmain didn't provide details about the E9's energy consumption or the product's expected prices. It also remains to be seen how soon it is able to ship the E9 amid an ongoing global chip shortage. 

Currently, InnoSilicon's A10 Pro with a 7GB memory is the most advanced Ethereum ASIC miner on the market, capable of producing as much as 740 MH/s. 

The Block reported last year that F2Pool reviewed a sample unit of the Phoenix Ethash ASIC miner made by Shenzhen-based upstart manufacturer Linzhi, which had been in the works for more than two years.

F2Pool's test showed Linzhi's hardware delivered 2,733 MH/s, which was already more advanced than the most top-of-the-line equipment available on the market at the time.

About Author

Wolfie joined The Block’s news team in 2020 and switched to the research side in 2021 to focus on crypto mining analysis. Prior to The Block, he had been a journalist at CoinDesk for three years. Wolfie has a background in financial journalism.