RESEARCH PAPER: The Importance Of Fabs In Crypto Mining

By Anshel Sag, Patrick Moorhead - May 29, 2018
The cryptocurrency markets have caused upheaval in the technology and financial markets. When the price of Bitcoin peaked at roughly $19,000, there was a mad rush to acquire cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. This frenzy drove people to flood the exchanges, many of which closed to new users, making acquiring cryptocurrencies difficult unless you mined it yourself. Because of the price of a single Bitcoin, people were ready and willing to spend virtually any amount of money to mine (using hashing computing power) these cryptocurrencies using GPUs and ASICs. Today, the current price of Bitcoin is $7,096, which is many times greater than it was a year ago. Despite this volatility, there has been a constant demand for hardware to feed the mining of cryptocurrencies. You can download the paper here.

Table of Contents:

  • Executive Summary
  • Cryptocurrency Mining Limits On GPUs
  • Leading ASIC Miners Are Using Leading Fab Partners
  • Fully Depleted-Silicon On Insulator (FD-SOI) For Cryptocurrency ASIC Mining
  • Call To Action

Companies Cited:

  • Bitmain Technologies
  • Globalfoundries
  • Samsung
  • TSMC
VP & Principal Analyst | Website | + posts

Anshel Sag is Moor Insights & Strategy’s in-house millennial with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. Anshel has had extensive experience working with consumers and enterprises while interfacing with both B2B and B2C relationships, gaining empathy and understanding of what users really want. Some of his earliest experience goes back as far as his childhood when he started PC gaming at the ripe of old age of 5 while building his first PC at 11 and learning his first programming languages at 13.

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights)  in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.