Tech giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is seeking to patent a hardware "accelerator" for Bitcoin (Bitcoin) mining chips.
In an application filed to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the company outlined a method by which it could augment the existing Bitcoin mining process, consuming less electricity - thereby spending less money - in the process.
“Because of the large amount of power utilized, and the relatively high cost of that power, mining Bitcoins can be a very costly endeavor. In some embodiments, the cost to mine a single Bitcoin may exceed the value of the mined Bitcoin,” the filing reads.
By combining a Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator with an optimized SHA-256 message digest and message scheduler datapaths, Intel’s patent aims to achieve possible 18% improvement in the critical path of a new method of computation, another probable 31.5% improvement in the critical path of a different set of computations.
“These optimizations may result in a 15% combinational area and 35% combinational power improvement in the message digest logic,” the patent states.