Bitmain releases fourth-generation Bitcoin mining chip BM1385

On August 19, 2015, Bitmain officially released the 4th generation Bitcoin mining chip BM1385 developed independently. It is reported that BM1385 adopts TSMC's 28nm process and uses a fully customized design solution. The computing power of a single chip can reach 32.5GH/S, and the power consumption is only 0.216W/GH/s at a core voltage of 0.66V. It is the chip with the lowest power consumption in the history of Bitcoin chips so far. Bitmain also stated that the AntMiner S7 based on this chip is under development and will be officially launched soon.

The core of the design of Bitcoin mining machine chips is to solve the contradiction between performance and power consumption. The lower the power consumption per unit of computing power, the less electricity is needed for mining. It also means that more computing power can be deployed under the same power. Since its establishment in 2013, Bitmain has successively released the 55nm Bitcoin chip BM1380, the 28nm chip BM1382, and the 28nm semi-custom chip BM1384. The biggest highlight of the BM1385 chip released this time is that it adopts a fully customized design solution. In the fully customized design, engineers go deep into the transistor level for optimization design. Therefore, a lot of manpower is required, and the entire development cycle takes a lot of time. However, if the design is ideal, full customization can make the chip run faster, consume less power, have a better yield, and have a higher output per unit area. Excellent fully customized chips can achieve extreme optimization, so the performance, power consumption, area and other indicators will greatly exceed the chips designed with standard library processes, but the manpower and time costs will also be much higher than the latter, and the risk of tape-out failure is also higher. According to our research, the overall performance of fully customized 28nm chips will be far better than Bitcoin mining chips that use 14/16nm advanced process technology but do not use fully customized design.

BM1385 can generate 32.5 GH/s of computing power at 0.66V per chip, with a power consumption of 0.216 W/GH/s. Compared with the previous generation chip BM1384, the computing power of BM1385 is increased by 45%, while the power consumption is reduced by 50%, which greatly reduces the electricity bill. Compared with the existing chip products in the Bitcoin mining machine market, the BM1385 chip has a far leading advantage in efficiency and integration. Bitmain's previous generation BM1384 chip is still the world's leading Bitcoin mining chip to date. The release of BM1385 at this time demonstrates Bitmain's core competitiveness in integrated circuit design and will further consolidate its unquestionable leadership in the Bitcoin mining industry. We expect that before Bitmain releases the next generation of 16nm fully customized chips, BM1385 will continue to lead the Bitcoin mining industry towards higher efficiency and lower costs.

Chip and mining machine power consumption comparison table