Samsung, who is one of the worlds largest SoC, DRAM, and NAND makers who has its own semiconductor fabs is looking to cash in on the crypto-currency mining craze. Reports indicate that the company has entered volume production of a highly efficient crypto-currency mining ASIC for an unnamed client from China. This client has apparently placed a massive order for this crypto-mining ASIC to be contract-manufactured by Samsung. The ASIC appears to be targeted at Bitcoin, for the time being.
Large ASIC solution providers like Bitman and Cannan have similarly contracted TSMC to manufacture mining ASICs. An ASIC (in mining terms) is a single-chip solution that combines a CPU, a SIMD parallel-processing component tailored for mining, memory, and storage. It has a much smaller smaller PCB, power, and thermal footprints compared to PCs with GPUs, and can be deployed in extremely large numbers for mining on an industrial-scale.
