According to Technews, Bitmain is about to release the Ethereum ASIC miner F3 in Q2 or Q3 2018.
“Bitmain is about to release F3, the ethereum ASIC miner. It’s reported that every miner is mounted with 3 mainboards. On each mainboard there are 6 ASIC processors, each of which has 32 1GB DDR3 memory. Therefore, one unit of F3 miner contains 72 Gigabyte DRAM memory.”
I have doubts on the math of the report because the numbers doesn’t add up.But 72G DRAM seems reasonable and already outperforms most of the GPU-based mining rigs in the market now.
The bottleneck of Bitmain’s mass production is supply of Dram memory, which explains why Bitmain is frequent visiting storage supplier in Taiwan. The demand of Bitmain is around 3,000 pieces of 12 inch wafers per month. Ethereum ASIC chips will enter mass production stage in February 2018 by TSMC’s 28nm process. The F3 miner is expected to hit the market in Q2 or Q3 2018.
The ethhash power algorithm of Ethereum is designed to be ASIC proof. But just like Charlie Lee put it:
“I think ASICs are inevitable when the coin is valuable. But that’s not a bad thing.”
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Bitmain has developed ASIC miner for Litecoin and Siacoin.
http://news.8btc.com/bitmain-to-release-ethereum-asic-miner-f3-with-72gb-ddr3-dram-in-q2