Korean giant Samsung is the newest mining maker to enter the bitcoin hardware market. The company's factory has begun, as it seems, the production of ASIC chip for a Chinese customer at the beginning of the month.
Samsung Mobile Phones
Samsung Electronics, the multinational conglomerate company in Korea, entered the mining market according to the latest local press reports. Prior to this announcement, they signed a contract with the Chinese mining hardware manufacturer to supply ASICs and went into mass production in January.
According to reports, Samsung Electronics ended last year the ASIC semiconductor development process for bitcoin mining. A spokesman for the company said in an interview with Korean newspaper The Bell that they are involved in a manufacturing deal for a virtual money mining company in China.
The ASIC mining market exploded after the massive price increase in 2017, and hardware makers like Bitmain have used their profits to persuade semiconductor plants to produce faces for them instead of traditional customers. It has recently come to light that the largest semiconductor factory, TSMC, expects the mining sector to continue to grow this year, perhaps offsetting Apple's weak iPhone X sales. Apple is the main client of the TSMC chip provider.
Graphics mining
Samsung would benefit not only from the increase in the number of ASIC miners, but also from the demand for graphics for the mining of other products. The company has begun mass production of a new type of DRAM graphics, which is said to be more suitable for cryptomonade mining. The 10-nanometer, 16 GD GDDRG DRAM, is twice faster than the conventional GDDR5 DRAM and improves mining efficiency by more than 35%, resulting in profitability for cryptomonade mining.
This shows that chip makers such as Samsung are aware of the use of graphics cards for cryptomonade mining by end-users and may even focus on new designs. Recently, it came to light that Nvidia's graphics card maker has taken steps to ensure that the products reach the gamers, not the miners.