Crypto Mining Blog

KNCMiner has announced that they will have a new 16 nm based ASIC chip called Solar ready in early 2015 (most likely a SHA-256 ASIC for Bitcoin mining). The company expects that their 5000+ core Solar 16nm (FinFET) processor technology will deliver at least a six-fold increase in performance compared to the previous generation 20nm hardware thus achieving 0.07 Watts per GHS. This should allow an increase of up to 10 times in the hashrate with the same power consumption of the previous generation of hardware. Interestingly enough the company only announced the new chips only and no miners that will be based on them, something that may not be so bad as an idea considering the negative opinion miners have on pre-orders including the previous ones from KNC. Regardless, it will be harder for KNC to sell new miners to customers unless they already have the hardware available and ready for shipping and not giving promises that they may not keep on shipping date. So the fact that no ASIC miner products using the new Solar chips are being announced yet could mean KNC can decide to use them in their cloud data centers only and not offer them to end users at all. KNCMiner is not without a competition however, CoinTerra, another ASIC manufacturer has already announced that they are working on 16nm chips and that miners based on them will be available in 2015. The fact that the 16nm production process is not yet widely available and ready for mass production would however mean that the first ASIC chips made using it may be pricier, at least until the yield of good chips is high enough. The development of very complex chips with thousands of cores is another thing that will require a serious financial support, but apparently KNC does not need to make pre-orders this time to get the money required from miners.