Aug 22, 2016 at 14:30 // News

Nina Lyon Author

Bitcoin mining requires a lot of power to produce new blocks. But what if there was a supercomputer that could mine Bitcoins alone, without any need to use mining farms or the P2P community?

Researchers at the University of California have recently designed a computer microchip with 1,000-processor cores, each of which can work independently, and together are capable of working through 1.78 trillion instructions per second. This microchip is perfect for encryption.



Moreover, this microchip is also extremely energy efficient, said Bevan Baas, lead researcher at the Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California. It can execute 115 billion instructions per second while being powered by a single AA battery.



Bevan Baas commented:



"To the best of our knowledge, it is the world’s first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university."



According to the report, this microchip, called KiloCore, was fabricated by IBM using their 32nm CMOS technology.



Even though there is no information that the University of California plans to use the new chip to build a supercomputer with dozens of such a microchips for cryptocurrency mining, the idea that the power of one computer may replace mining farms could change the situation.



However, a similar idea came to one of the researchers of Harvard University in 2014, when he was using the university’s computers for Dogecoin mining. He or she was using Harvard’s supercomputer network “Odyssey” for mining this altcoin. Well, this researcher was fired from the university.

It is at this time that we must remember that “with great power, there must also come - great responsibility” and, probably, great mining.