The world’s leading bitcoin blockchain infrastructure provider BitFury has announced the coming release of a new efficient 16nm Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chip that will have the computing power of 184 gigahash per second.

The power efficiency of the chip will be 0.6 joules per gigahash, writes BitFury in the press release. The chip can work at a very low voltage of 0.35V. The company claims that the average productivity of each 16nm chip will be about 140 gigahash per second with air cooling, and 184 gigahash per second with immersion cooling. The technology of immersion cooling applied by BitFury makes hardware cooling a cheaper and faster process.

Valery Vavilov, founder and CEO of BitFury, said: “We are very excited to launch mass production of our super 16nm ASIC Chip. The final results of our hard work have fully met our expectations. We understand that it will be nearly impossible for any older technology to compete with the performance of our new 16nm technology. As a responsible player in the Bitcoin community, we will be working with integration partners and resellers to make our unique technology widely available ensuring that the network remains decentralized and we move into the exahash era together.”

The “exahash era” mentioned by Vavilov refers to passing the landmark when joint computing productivity of all bitcoin mining farms exceeds one exahash (one quintillion hash operations).

The 16nm chip will be applied in BitFury’s new 100 MW bitcoin data centre built in Tbilisi, Georgia, together with the previous model of 28 nm chips, which were introduced in March 2015. This is the company’s second data centre in Georgia. The first one is situated in the Eastern Georgian city of Gori. The country attracts BitFury because of competitive energy and labour costs, as well as good taxation regime and lack of corruption, said Vavilov.

BitFury is the leading bitcoin infrastructure producer and transaction processing company founded in 2011, with management offices in Washington DC and Amsterdam. The company owns data centres in Iceland and Georgia. It has a roadmap for doubling performance-per-watt in each of them in 6 to 12 months. The constant development of mining facilities is necessary because the difficulty of bitcoin mining grows all the time and mining requires accelerating computing operations.

Andrew Levich