Earlier this month, Bitmain, the Beijing based bitcoin mining equipment manufacturer had announced the launch of its latest bitcoin mining ASIC. The company claimed that its latest mining ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) BM1385 is more energy efficient and faster than its predecessor BM1384 and will be part of the company’s latest bitcoin mining hardware.
Bitmain has now launched its latest version of Antminer range of bitcoin miners. The new Antminer S7 with the latest BM1385 mining ASIC boasts of being the most efficient and powerful bitcoin miner till date manufactured by Bitmain. Antminer S7 is said to consume 50 percent less power per gigahash than the previous Antminer S5.
Bitmain had earlier launched another limited version bitcoin miner named Antminer S5+ capable of churning out 3000 GH/s more than the latest Antminer S7. However, the Antminer S5+ was bigger than S7 and in comparison with S5+, Antminer S7 offers more for less in terms of size. Antminer S7 uses the custom BM1385 chipset whose design deviates from that of all the previous ASICs manufactured by Bitmain. The new BM1385 ASICs follow a full-custom design flow which results in a greater efficiency. The only drawback of using full-custom design flow is the margin of error, which increases drastically and it is also more work intensive when it comes to design and fabrication.
Antminer S7 has 162 BM1385 ASICs generating over 4850 GH/s while using as less as 0.25 J/GH of power. The company has already started the development of its next mining ASIC offering. The new ASIC will be called BM1387 and it will be Bitmain’s second full custom chip. The timeline for its release is not yet known.
Bitmain expects Antminer S7 to gain widespread acceptance among the miner community as the older ones become obsolete.