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Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator with Optimized Message Datapath
- based2 9y agosrc: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intel-beantragt-Patent-auf-Bitcoin-Mining-Chip-4009695.html https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Intel-beantragt-Pate...
- sb1752 9y agoInteresting this was filed in September 2016
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y agoThey filed ~2 years too late as far as I can tell.
- sdhgaiojfsa 9y agoI'd guess not? They seem to have patented a particular approach to doing this on-chip, which may or may not have prior art.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoIsn't it first-to-file now?
- shemnon42 9y ago(a) it is first /inventor/ to file. You cannot patent stuff you (for various values of you) didn't invent. (b) it is still subject to prior art disclosures.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y agoIf this is actually enforced my money would be on a hardfork changing to a PoW.
- cornholio 9y agoTried to read the claims and realized again that patents are unreadable to an engineer and completely useless for any useful advancement of the field. Clearly, somebody was working on a mining chip design and took advantage of the patent incentives these companies offer employees to build a warchest. The lawyers then took the description they provided and turned into this steaming pile of technolegal jargon.
- ShaneCurran 9y agoI wouldn’t read too much into this. Intel have very generous employee “patent creation” bonuses that encourage them to constantly file patents, ca. $2500 per patent IIRC. That being said, it’s still interesting seeing Intel encouraging and embracing crypto ASIC design.
- stagger87 9y ago"Generous"
- vernie 9y agoIs that incentive per application or per grant?
- sweden 9y agoUsually it's per grant. It's quite common for big companies like Intel to give bonuses to the employees for filling patents. The attitude of these companies is to incentivize employees to patent whatever they come up with, whether they intend to use the idea or not.
- pkaye 9y agoI've seen a split approach like 50% at disclosure and 50% at grant because the employer wants to see you follow through in assisting with the paperwork. Quite a few never reach grant stage or take so long that you may have even moved to a new employer.
- ggg9990 9y agoIt differs by company, but is not that easily gameable. (I’ve tried many times and succeeded only once in filing an application that was completely trash). The company’s patent lawyers ultimately decide what they will and won’t file, and they are more time constrained than budget constrained).
- Rebelgecko 9y agoIs that just a flat $2500, no profit/royalty sharing? Seems like a good way to get people to churn out lots of low quality patents. I like the scheme where I work--there's a relatively small cash bonus (a few hundred bucks), but the inventors get a nice chunk of any income from the patent. Another slice goes to the inventor's department's budget, so they can indirectly benefit there too.
- jacquesm 9y agoAs usual the patent gets awarded to the party that doesn't have a product or even a proof of concept while the market has already moved on and has been selling the product for years.
- monochromatic 9y ago>As usual Is that what usually happens? Really?
- jacquesm 9y agoMost patents that I come across read as landgrabs, not as companies that actually have working prototypes, proofs of concept or any plans to produce those. The patent system is seriously broken.
- monochromatic 9y agoIf the market has been selling the claimed product for years, why would anyone waste the money on a patent application?
- jacquesm 9y agoBeing late never stopped anybody from filing for a patent. I've been sued by patent trolls that somehow got a patent on live streaming video to the browser way past where we were doing it in public. Others have been on the receiving end of similar lawsuits. Fortunately our efforts were very well documented so we managed to get rid of them but it was quite annoying that such a patent ever got granted. Especially because I made a conscious decision not to patent it myself because I felt it was a trivial thing and the time was simply ripe for doing it.
- pwg 9y agoTitle change required. Look at the linked page, it says: "United States Patent Application". The linked doc is an "application". It is not yet a patent. It very likely has not even been looked at from a patent-ability standpoint.
- sctb 9y agoThanks, we've updated the title from “Intel patents Bitcoin mining hardware accelerator”.
- thecompilr 9y agoIntel encourages employees to file all sorts of crappy patents, but I don't see it as a bad or evil practice, but rather as a defensive strategy. Meaning that they don't really enforce patent usage on others, instead they need to have a trove of own patents as defense against patent trolls.
- dec0dedab0de 9y agoExcept if they go out of business at some point, and all those patents end up in the hands of trolls.
- Viper007Bond 9y agoI don't see Intel going out of business any time soon...
- john_moscow 9y agoMuch likely they would get acquired by another BigCo specifically for patents, trademarks, etc.
- gruez 9y ago>instead they need to have a trove of own patents as defense against patent trolls but the whole point of patent trolling is that you're suing via a non-practicing entity, which a shell company that does nothing but hold patents, so there's nothing to sue back at.
- utopcell 9y agoMost likely it doesn't help against trolls but strengthens their position in cross-licensing negotiations with other companies. When a company's portfolio includes many thousands of patents, due diligence to discover the important ones becomes impossible and it's then a numbers game.
- fipple 9y agoKind of pointless since all Bitcoin hardware is made by Chinese companies who don’t give two shits about patents.
- gruez 9y agobitmain certainly cares enough about asicboost to oppose a bitcoin extension that would break asicboost (segwit).
- wslh 9y agoAsicBoost can be potentially used by anyone since it is now a defensive patent. Bitmain cares about this patent because they need to disclose all other patents they have if they want to use AsicBoost: "There Is a Bitcoin Patent War Going On, but This Initiative Could End It" [1] [1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/there-bitcoin-patent-war-going-initiative-could-end-it/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/there-bitcoin-patent-wa...
- gruez 9y agoThat was only announced last month. I suspect the only reason they promised to use it for defensive purposes is because its utility is significantly reduced due to successful roll-out of segwit. Had segwit not have passed, I doubt they would leave hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table by not licensing it.
- stale2002 9y agoSegwit did not break covert asicboost. The math proved that wrong, and that one could make very small, inexpensive changes to have it continue working with segwit. This was admitted by Greg Maxwell in the dev mailing lists, when they proposed an asicboost blocker only change, that they rescinded because they realized that it and segwit never actually stopped covert asicboost. It was also confirmed by experts like chjj (CTO of purse.io, and Bitcoin developer) that segwit never blocked covert asicboost.
- mrb 9y agoStop spreading this conspiracy theory stuff (which is very popular on /r/Bitcoin) Bitmain's own pools—AntPool and BTC.com—were voting for (not against) Segwit through nVersion flags in July 2017 Although Bitmain have had criticism about segwit, they are overall «publicly on record as historically supporting it» source: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaigns/ https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-sme... They signed this pro-segwit letter: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...
- makomk 9y agoSome complicated pipelining optimization that claims to reduce the critical path of each pipeline stage, increasing the clock speed and/or decreasing the required voltage for a given clock speed, written in impenetrable patentese. The easiest pipeline optimisation, which is basically free hardware-wise and is documented in the academic literature for years, is to move the computation of W + K + H to the previous pipeline stage, reducing the critical path. This is a trivial win because all the data is available already and H can be discarded afterwards, which also has the nice bonus of mapping more efficiently to certain FPGA hardware. It sounds like Intel have taken this and expanded on it to move even more things into earlier and later stages of the pipeline. Or, as Intel puts it, "The precomputed (H.sub.i+K.sub.i+W.sub.i) may be stored in the 32-bit register 402 dedicated for H.sub.i. This optimization reduces the critical path for the computation of E.sub.i+1 by one CSA or approximately three logic gates." I implemented this back in 2011 in some open source FPGA mining code, and it was an old trick even back then. They don't seem to be citing any prior art, which is a bit dubious.
- DoctorOetker 9y agoI take it you understand the specific optimization. Is there a reason they keep talking about a '32-bit' this and that? or should that be '32 byte' as that would be 256 bits?
- makomk 9y agoSHA-256 operates almost entirely on 32-bit values, because it's designed to be efficient to compute on general-purpose CPUs without special hardware support. The SHA-256 state consists of 8 32-bit integers, of which 2 are updated each round. (SHA-512 uses 64-bit integers instead for some reason.)