Bitmain, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of Bitcoin mining hardware, has recently announced the next-generation Antminer S7, its first product to use the recently announced BM1385 chip.”This machine is not only our most efficient ever, using less than half the energy per gigahash of the S5, but it is also our most powerful miner to enter mass production (the S5+ had a higher hashrate but was sold on a limited basis). At 0.25 joules per gigahash, this is the most efficient machine available to the bitcoin mining public”, the company’s website read.While speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, Jake Smith, Bitmain’s head of North America said, “It’s true that the S5+ had a greater overall hashrate, but the S7 squeezes more juice from a smaller, more power efficient package”. He added, “When comparing hashrate to weight, size, or power consumption, the S7 comes out ahead.”Describing the denser configuration of the Antminer S7, Bitmain said that it uses 162 chips in the same space that the S5 used only 60 in. Moreover, the S7 uses just 1,210 watts of electricity to deliver a massive 4.86 terahashes per second of pure mining power.”It’s difficult to predict the how long our new chip will take to bring to market, but development on our next chip began almost as soon as this one was completed. Our next chip, the BM1387, will be our second full-custom chip, and our first chip built on a 16-nanometer process node,” Smith said.With the release of every new chip, miners have to decide whether to upgrade. Smith said that there has been significant interest in the S7 by current Bitmain miners, especially because older hardware may become outdated.”The inevitable large deployment of S7s will cause network hashrate to rise and some older hardware to be forced offline. More recent hardware like the S5 will still be profitable, but to a lower degree than at present,” Smith said.
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