Valery Vavilov of BitFury on the 16nm Bitcoin ASIC
BitFury recently announced its completion and roll out of their 16nm ASIC for processing Bitcoin transactions. They are also going to be selling direct to customers large and small, which is a change from the last few generations of their chips. Valery Vavilov the Founder and CEO of BitFury was able to answer a couple questions on the new chip and the roll-out.
Also Read: BitFury Unveils Fastest Bitcoin Mining Chip Ever Created
BitFury’s New Bitcoin ASIC
Scott Fargo (SF): The new ASIC chip is a big advancement in power and efficiency. What were some of the difficulties in mass producing a chip at 16nm and how were they overcome?
Valery Vavilov (VV): Needless to say, this technological advancement didn’t come easy and there were challenges to getting there but we are extremely pleased with the result.
The BF8162C16 ASIC is 16nm with each chip producing 100gh/s at 0.1 J/GH which is unprecedented power efficiency in Bitcoin ASICs. When I spoke to Valery at the 2014 North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami they were working hard on the chip design as well as deployment options. Now a year later the chip is in production and BitFury is driving a huge increase in the global Bitcoin network HashRate. The dedication to the whole picture beyond the ASIC chip itself has allowed them to greatly increase efficiency with immersion cooling on top of the great efficiency via traditional air cooling solutions. They are offering drop in data center solutions that will allow others to benefit from the optimization as well.
SF: BitFury has stated they are going to now sell to more people to help keep mining decentralized. Does this also mean that they will open up the BitFury pool for people to mine on as well?
VV: BitFury is fundamentally committed to being a responsible player in the Bitcoin community and we want to work with all integrated partners and re-sellers to make our unique technology widely available ensuring that the network remains decentralized and we move into the exahash era together.
SF: Does the new ASIC allow for more devices of the Internet of Things type like the mining light bulb and more? Will BitFury be producing any of these types of devices like the Ant-Router and the 21Inc system?
VV: We plan to bring our chips to the market in early 2016 so that users could deploy it on any device. This is a very exciting time in our industry. We are opening our integrators platform and would welcome any resellers and integrators to participate in our decentralization program. We will be announcing more details and sharing more information about our initiatives and programs in the next few months.
SF: Can you share how the progress is going on the 100 Mw data center and how important the cooling setups have been to the expansion?
VV: On December 16 we launched the first phase (40WM) of our planned 100MW infrastructure. A second phase is already in the works as well.
BitFury’s immersion cooling technology allows us to remove the heat from the chip very efficiently boosting chip performance to maximum speed. Immersion cooling technology significantly increases power density, reduces energy consumption and deployment time and is environmentally sustainable. Running our data centers with zero carbon print is an important part of our business and growth strategy. We are already relying on renewable energy for all our data center operations.
Thank you Valery for the interview. BitFury continues to grow and at the time of publication has 15% of the global hash rate which has grown to roughly an exahash (1000 PetaHash) in the last few months. BitFury also purses green, renewable energy sources to run their data center in Georgia. In going this route they are also keeping their carbon footprint lower than it could be otherwise. We will have more from BitFury very soon.
What are your thoughts on the new BitFury ASIC? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of BitFury.com, Blockchain.info
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