I heard some stuff about Intel releasing 14nm tech a while back and if things keep on as they have done lately I'd not bet against them coming to a rig near you soon...
Bitcoin market cap: ~1.5 Billion USD
Intel market cap: ~110 Billion USD
I think Bitcoin still has a long way to go to become interesting for the likes of Intel. And should that day ever come their 14nm tech is going to be the least of my worries
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$17 million that HashFast and Cointerra have (supposedly) made in pre-orders isn't nothing. Intel makes lots of chips, not just desktop CPUs but lots of ASICs as well.
Back when SSDs were starting to get popular Intel came out with their own, and it performed way better then anything else on the market - not because the flash memory was any better, but because the ASIC they used to interface the flash to SATA was so much better. Other drives were fast for the most part, but would randomly lag under typical desktop usage (where tons of little files, like dlls and registry keys need to be read and written too constantly)
Turns out, Intel looked at the available controllers, decided they all sucked, and just made their own. Now that SSD controllers are a lot better, Intel doesn't make them any more.
Of course, I doubt that little asic was made at their smallest process node. And from what I understand development costs go up significantly the smaller you go.
However my guess is that for Intel those costs might not be as high, since they'll likely have all the software, test equipment, and so on available right away.
And, of course, they have their own fabs. Which means that, not only do they not need to deal with third party companies to interface with the fabs, as most bitcoin ASIC people have had to do, access to things like spots on multi-project wafers should be easy to get, even on short notice.
It would depend on what kind of resources they want to spend on it - but given the time sensitive nature Intel could do things like kick existing slots off of wafer runs to get test chips and so on.
Difference being, SSDs were upcoming consumer grade hardware, while specialized Bitcoin mining rigs are still more of a fringe phenomena in a highly speculative market.
It was definitely in Intel's interest to push / improve the PC market, while Bitcoin ASICs might not fit as well in their agenda.
However the market cap argument doesn't hold up entirely, I'll give you that.
Either way, I doubt that Intel will enter the mining rig market before Bitcoin's mainstream adoption significantly improves. It's an interesting thought though.