It's been just a year since Intel officially announced its Bitcoin-mining Blockscale ASICs, but today the company announced the end of life of its first-gen Blockscale 1000-series chips without announcing any follow-up generations of the chips. We spoke with Intel on the matter, and the company told Tom's Hardware that “As we prioritize our investments in IDM 2.0, we have end-of-lifed the Intel Blockscale 1000 Series ASIC while we continue to support our Blockscale customers.”
Intel's statement cites the company's tighter focus on its IDM 2.0 operations as the reason for ending the Blockscale ASICs, a frequent refrain in many of its statements as it has exited several businesses amid company-wide belt-tightening. We also asked Intel if it planned to exit the Bitcoin ASIC business entirely, but the company responded, "We continue to monitor market opportunities."
In the original announcement that the company would enter the blockchain market, then-graphics-chief Raja Koduri noted that the company had created a Custom Compute Group within the AXG graphics unit to support the Bitcoin ASICs and "additional emerging technology." However, Intel recently restructured the AXG group, and Koduri left the company shortly thereafter. We asked Intel about the fate of the Custom Compute Group, but it says it has no organizational changes to share at this time.
