Chinese mining firm Bitmain (opens in new tab) has released a teaser of the company's upcoming Antminer E9 Ethereum mining rig (opens in new tab), built around a new application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) (opens in new tab) chip.
The Antminer E9 reportedly delivers a hash rate of up to 3 GH/s when mining Ether cryptocurrency (opens in new tab). In its teaser, Bitmain claims this is equivalent to the hash rate of 32 GeForce RTX 3080 (opens in new tab) graphics cards.
Assuming that a single GeForce RTX 3080 has a hash rate of around 95 MH/s, HotHardware extrapolates that calculation to equate the performance of the Antminer E9 to that of 25 GeForce RTX 3090 (opens in new tab) graphics cards, each of which dishes around 120 MH/s.
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No word on availability
Many observers rate the Linzhi “Phoenix” ASIC miner as the current fastest Ethereum miner. If Bitmain manages to deliver the figures it promises in the teaser, it’ll slightly edge out the 2.6 GH/s hash rate of the Phoenix.
More importantly though, the Bitmain Antminer E9 draws up to 2557 watts together with a power efficiency of 0.85 J/M, which could make it nearly fifteen percent more efficient than the Phoenix, which guzzles about 3000 watts.
While Bitmain hasn’t shared any details about the availability or the pricing of the Antminer E9, rest assured it’ll cost quite a penny. While the Phoenix sells for $11,300 and $13,700, the word on Twitter is that the Antminer E9 would cost somewhere $25,000 and $30,000.
HotHardware again breaks out back-of-the-envelope calculations to suggest that, given the current prices of graphics cards, particularly the crypto-favorite GeForce RTX 3080, the rumored price tag would still be an “absolute bargain".
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- Also check our collection of the best mining CPUs (opens in new tab)
Via HotHardware (opens in new tab)
