Over the past 12 months Kncminer have established themselves as one of the leaders in the mining hardware industry and have been praised for their innovation, being the first mining company to offer 28nm and 20nm technology.
Continuing the trend of bleeding edge technology, this week the Swedish company have announced a new 16nm FinFet solar processor set to launch in early 2015, though the specifics are yet to be announced. KnC stated on their latest blog post that the new 16nm chips will deliver performance that is six times faster than 20nm: 0.07 W/GHs (watts per gigahash per second) and that he new Solar chip will have more than 5,000 cores
The new chip will be offered as a solution for their cloud mining, as well as in their new mining hardware which has come as a surprise to many, following co founder Sam Cole’s recent interview with Bloomberg which alluded that going forward the company would not focus on small scale mining
[blockquote]KnC says its shift in focus reflects an industry-wide trend. “We’re seeing a complete change in the industry,” Cole said. “It’s accelerated out of the garage and the homes, to the small businesses, to the large data centers, and now you’ve got to have a mega data center for it to be profitable.” “ [/blockquote]
Although KnC Miner is keeping the specifics of the hardware under wraps until the New Year. Its Solar technology has been developed in-house, allowing it to keep everything private, there’s no other information about the manufacturing process, or who is making these new 16nm chips at this moment in time.
Will It Be Worth It?
While we expect KnCminer to provide a more efficient chip, there are no benchmarks at the moment and upfront costs are bound to be expensive for this type of chip development, implying a high priced device. As the mining race heats up one again there will also be other companies hot on their heels, releasing their new generation hardware. Already Cointerra have announced their 16nm release for early 2015 and with companies like Spondoolies Tech and Bitmain pushing the capabilities of their more affordable 28nm hardware, the mining space is going to be flooded with new, even more powerful, efficient hardware.
There is also a well known issue withwith FinFET manufacturing. It does undoubtedly result in far better performance, but manufacturing is slower, since there are far more issues to contend with. However, how long Kncminer have been working on this project has not been revealed and they may already have made significant headway into the development process.