Innosilicon's new Bitcoin miner is powerful, but GMO's B3 remains the best

Bitcoin mining is a very competitive industry. It has been developing exponentially over the past few years. Within nine months, many new members were added to the group of mining equipment companies such as GMO Group, Halong Mining and Ebang.

There is now a new company that is partnering with the Samsung semiconductor factory called Innosilicon, which has launched production of the Terminator 2-Turbo, claiming to have achieved a hashrate of 24 trillion hashes per second (TH/s). The mining hardware industry has become super competitive lately, with a plethora of new rigs emerging that are designed with much faster semiconductors. 

For example, Ebang and its Ebit E10 miner, focused on the SHA-256 algorithm, launched independently developed 10nm chips last year. The machine's specifications indicate a power consumption of only 1650 W and a maximum hashrate of 18 TH/s. However, this rig cannot be purchased from the manufacturer Ebang due to the fact that it is completely sold out and can only be found on the secondary market. 

Halong Mining then developed the Dragonmint T1 miner, also using SHA-256, which generated 16 trillion hashes per second. Halong also uses a 10nm chip developed by Samsung, but Halong's miner has also sold out and has been unavailable for months.

Focus on speed and power efficiency

Now Hong Kong-based Innosilicon has created a faster SHA-256 miner that computes 24 TH/s using low-power chips built with Samsung Foundry's Finfet technology. The Bitcoin.com news section initially reported on the new miner from Innosilicon when it was discovered that four containers of the original Terminator 2 model had been shipped to the US to a company known as Blockstream.

"Innosilicon's current ASIC is already used in the most power efficient miner known as Terminator 2 with 17.2 TH/s at 1430W+10%," explains the Hong Kong firm. The updated T2-Turbo miner offers an impressive 24TH/s in normal mode, while power consumption is only 75W/TH, which is 30% better than its nearest competitor.

Ryan Sanghyun Lee, vice president of semiconductor manufacturing marketing at Samsung Electronics, said his company was pleased with the partnership with Innosilicon. “We are very pleased to provide the lowest power solution for Smart Server through Innosilicon to ensure very competitive hardware lifespan,” said Lee.. “We believe that Innosilicon's T2 ASIC, based on Samsung's advanced low-power FinFET technology, will offer differentiated value to its customers with clear benefits of energy efficiency and high performance.”

T2-Turbo Benefits

Roger Mao, vice president of technology at Innosilicon, explains that the new T2-Turbo will provide miners with lower operational risk with a better return on investment (ROI) versus other chips over the next 12-24 months. Innosilicon and Samsung will go a long way as good partners to bring more interesting low-power products to the market in the coming years,” Mao emphasized.

Even though 24 trillion hashes per second is a very competitive performance, T2-Turbo is not the most efficient miner on the planet. Some time ago, GMO Group showed a B2 rig that is on par with Innosilicon's T2-Turbo with its 24 TH/s. Now GMO has launched the B3, which beats the B2 and T2-Turbo with an impressive 33TH/s speed. The Japanese GMO Group has released chips using 7 nm semiconductor technology, which no other miner manufacturer on the market has yet used.

However, the Innosilicon T2-Turbo should bring some additional competition to the market. The car sells for $1,350 each. The development team also released a video about the production of Terminator 2 and its performance. In addition, there are rumors on the Web on Wechat forums that Canaan Creative is soon planning to release a very powerful rig. A screenshot of the description of the new Canaan Avalon 9 shows that the new machine will have a performance of 26-30TH/s. This machine is not available on Canaan's website and the rumor and screenshot are unconfirmed at the time of publication. Miners from GMO Group and Innosilicon remain the most productive until the next generation of more efficient miners appears. Meanwhile, mining giant Bitmain Technologies has released a series of new ASIC miners to mine a variety of coins, but has yet to update its SHA-256 Antminer S9s, which has performance somewhere between 13.2 and 14 TH/s.

According to Bitcoin.com