Global technology giant Intel has received a patent related to work in the field of cryptocurrency mining. This week, the Us patent and trademark office (USPTO) issued a patent to the company, which describes a processor capable of performing "energy efficient and high-performance mining of bitcoin" in accordance with the SHA-256 algorithm, which uses the largest cryptocurrency. According to Intel's patent application, hardware accelerators such as as ASIC chips, which require a large amount of energy, are usually needed for mining devices in the Bitcoin network. Hardware accelerators are needed, in particular, to process 32-bit random codes – a combination of bits used once during block creation. Current ASIC calculations are made in several stages, which represents the excess work. As the patent says: "Special ASICS for bitcoin mining are used to implement several SHA-256 mechanisms. Embodiments of the present project used micro-optimizations, including selective binding of certain hardware parameters in computing during the bitcoin mining".
