Specs and Price of 7nm Bitcoin Mining Rigs Unveiled by Japan’s GMO
GMO, Japanese internet giant has announced in a press conference on Tuesday, June 5, the details of its bitcoin mining rigs dubbed “GMO miner B2.” This announcement was made ahead of the launching itself, that was scheduled for the morning of June 6.
Nikkei reported: “The GMO miner B2 features a semiconductor chip “GMO 72b” dedicated to mining that adopts the in-house developed 7-nanometer process technology. The hash rate indicating the computing capacity of mining is 24 TH/s, and can calculate hash 24 trillion times per second.”
The popular Bitmain Antminer S9’s hashrate is 14TH/s.
Bloomberg says that GMO chips are designed in Japan and produced in Taiwan.
The chairman and director of GMO Internet and GMO Group representative, Masatoshi Kumagai, described the advantages of his company’s mining equipment over other products.
“The performance per unit is higher than that of major competitors’ products,” he was quoted by the news outlet. “If we switch from over 20,000 mining machines operating in Northern Europe to GMO miner B2, the installation space will be about half in terms of equivalent performance.”
Itmedia noted that: “Compared to general mining machines…the power consumption is up to 20%, the cost of network equipment etc. can be reduced to 1/55.”
According to Kumai publication reported from the press conference, each unit consumes 1,950 watts and power supply units can supply up to 2,200 watts at 240V.
Nikkei said that GMO miner B2 will be sold via the company’s branch in Zug, Switzerland. The sale was to start on Wednesday and orders will start shipping from the end of October, as reported by news.Bitcoin.com.
The publication added that the price for each unit will be announced monthly. It also revealed that the “sales price in June is $1,999.” Itmedia said: “The price for the June release is $1,999 (including power supply unit, excluding tax). The sales price is adjusted monthly according to demand etc. The number of shipments was kept private.”
According to Mr. Masatoshi, as he told reporters, so far the crypto mining industry is dominated “by mining machines provided by Bitmain, a major mining hardware company in China,” and that he “noticed the fact that not a single Japanese company that is good at manufacturing is able to participate.”
He went ahead by revealing that the company “invested nearly 10 billion yen for the development of the product,” the publication conveyed and quoted the chairman explaining:
“We are not setting business targets such as sales targets yet, but if we cannot sell it, we will use it in our mining business, so I think that it is a very excellent business in that there is no inventory risk.”
He later added, “we also provide an API (application programming interface) for system monitoring compatible with GMO miner B2 and a detection function [for] when the product is connected to the net at the time of an unlikely event of theft.”
