Jack Dorsey’s financial technology company Block has unveiled the first prototype for the bitcoin hashboard as a part of its Mining Development Kit (MDK) that was announced earlier this year. The MDK consists of four integral components, with the hashboard being the key pillar.
Block’s Announcement
As per the announcement, Block has officially completed the first prototype for the bitcoin hashboard, which “sits at the heart of the mining system.” The company described the hashboard as a printed circuit board (PCB) capable of hosting an array of mining ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). Notably, the ASICs are responsible for the complex calculations that drive the bitcoin mining process.
Related reading: What is Bitcoin Mining?
Hashboard’s Specifications
Block revealed that the hashboard prototype utilized the 100x Intel Blockscale 1000 Series™ ASICs in a gridlike array. The prototype is created while keeping focus on cost-effectiveness and meeting available power budget and physical dimension constraints. The announcement reads:
“[The] ASIC count ensures the MDK board, in a standard three-board chassis format, will have a power footprint compatible with the widely available APW12 power supply. The hashboard is also sized to be compatible with popular miner chassis dimensions. It has thus been designed to allow easy use of aftermarket components.”
Further, to keep temperatures steady and maximize power efficiency by maintaining an operational steady state, aluminum heatsinks have been attached to the board via a Thermal Interface Material (TIM). The heatsink is responsible for extracting the heat from the ASICs and keeping them at a specific temperature to reduce power consumption during the bitcoin mining process.
Block stated that it placed “a microcontroller on the hashboard itself, allowing local processing of certain functions, such as ASIC balancing, while leaving the higher-level control functions to the controller board.” Components have also been introduced to support “fine-grained modulation of the power consumption of the hashboard.”
The Vision of Block
The company claims that the hashboard is “capable of operating across a very wide range of power and efficiency.” Moreover, as per Block, the MDK hashboard will also support on-chip temperature monitoring to prevent ASICs from failing by shutting them down before they reach extremely high temperatures.
Block added:
“We’d love to see the MDK used to explore innovative, sustainable energy applications for mining. We also hope our transparent and open-source approach offers a practical improvement for developers looking to work on novel mining applications. We look forward to feedback from MDK users on how we can best serve their needs with our future mining system hardware and software offerings.”
The Mining Development Kit will also consist of a custom controller board that will work with the hashboard, along with an open-source firmware, a software API, and a web front-end to allow developers to modify the key performance parameters of the hashboard.
