{"id":9359,"date":"2022-10-24T18:57:08","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T17:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/?p=9359"},"modified":"2022-10-24T18:57:08","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T17:57:08","slug":"how-a-small-intel-team-built-a-blockchain-chip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/?p=9359","title":{"rendered":"How a small Intel team built a blockchain chip"},"content":{"rendered":"

Behind the builders: Ajat Hukkoo leads an Intel team that \u2018builds accelerators in an accelerated manner.\u2019 The Intel Blockscale ASIC fits the bill on both fronts<\/strong><\/p>\n

It all started with a curious email to Ajat Hukkoo. \u201cI was trying to build new businesses and my boss\u2019s technical assistant sent me an email saying, \u2018Well, there is this thing called bitcoin, how about it? Are you doing anything with it? Are you thinking about it?\u2019
\n\u201cAnd to be honest, I was not.\u201d
\nIn June, a couple years and a global pandemic distant from that original email, Intel started shipping the Intel\u00ae Blockscale™ ASIC, a tiny \u2014 as in about 10 would fit on a U.S. postage stamp \u2014 accelerator for energy-efficient cryptocurrency mining. The milestone marked a celebratory moment for a small Intel team called Accelerated Custom Engineering, led by Hukkoo, a vice president with the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG).<\/p>\n

Acceleration, accelerated<\/strong>
\nAs he dug into it, Hukkoo discovered there were others at Intel looking into blockchains, some who had even built foundational technology that could apply. What was missing, though, was a product and a route to market. That\u2019s where Hukkoo\u2019s team comes in.
\n\u201cWe build accelerators in an accelerated manner,\u201d he explains.
\nBlockscale meets the benchmark on both fronts. It\u2019s capable of trillions of data operations every second, and it came to market less than a year after the team finalized its design.
\nEach Blockscale chip contains hundreds of little math engines, originally developed within Intel Labs, that tackle the cryptographic hash function used in the mining process. A mining rig will then combine a few hundred of these chips in a metal box not much bigger than a typical lunch pail.
\nSome cryptocurrencies can be minted via computationally demanding math (a process called cryptomining). Blockscale aims to make the cryptomining hardware business \u2014 trending toward $11 billion in annual sales by 2025 \u2014 more customizable, flexible and efficient.
\nWhat\u2019s remarkable about the speed and quality of the Blockscale project is that it\u2019s a completely off-roadmap product for a new-to-Intel market, and also that the team didn\u2019t just build a chip. They also built the boards that marry as many as 100 chips together, a controller that orchestrates them all together and the software that runs it. \u201cIt\u2019s a complete solution,\u201d Hukkoo confirms.
\n\u201cThen we can go to our customers and say, \u2018Here\u2019s the chip and the reference board, so you can take our design and improve on it, or you can take the design as is and make your own systems out of it,\u2019\u201d explains Hukkoo.
\nThe Blockscale ASIC is now shipping in high volume, and as Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to investors in July, \u201cWe expect to ship millions of units this year, not originally in our forecast.\u201d<\/p>\n

If software sells chips, make software first<\/strong>
\nOne key to making this all work quickly \u2014 with a global team of a few dozen engineers \u2014 is parallel work similar to how a 300-chip mining rig runs. \u201cI always follow what I call a platform-first approach, where we\u2019re not building the chip in a vacuum,\u201d Hukkoo says. \u201cIt is always being built with software in mind, because chips don\u2019t sell themselves \u2014 it is software on the chips that sell the chips.\u201d
\n\u201cWe have the software architect on the chip from Day One,\u201d he adds, \u201cto make sure that what the hardware team is building is usable.\u201d The chip goes through three different phases of virtual design, each of which the software team uses to build on top of, in parallel, enabling complete end-to-end operation before the chip is sent to manufacturing. That means the actual final chip \u201cis usually the fourth thing the software team has seen.\u201d
\nOn the hardware side, the other priority besides faster math was saving power. \u201cThere is no other product at Intel that ships at this ultra-low voltage,\u201d Hukkoo notes, less than half the voltage of a typical Intel chip. To achieve it, the team had to take some risks. They took a leap of faith on a power-saving approach that Hukkoo describes as what an electrical engineering professor \u201cwould teach you about and then tell you not to use, because there\u2019s too much risk in it.\u201d But after a bunch of simulations and a successful test chip, \u201cwe knew we could build a product out of it.\u201d
\nAs a result, the Blockscale ASIC is both fast and flexible \u2014 it can be run at a wide range of frequencies, enabling system designers to balance performance and efficiency.<\/p>\n

Back to the start-up<\/strong>
\n\u201cI like to work on the small projects that have directional impact on the company,\u201d says Hukkoo. \u201cI like to keep my teams small and have people do more than one job.\u201d That keeps people from fighting over territory and opens more opportunities to learn and try new things, he explains.
\n\u201cI hire for interest and capability and not for what people know, because nobody knows everything. New fields come up all the time and you have to be able to absorb information and grow and make contributions in those areas.\u201d
\nNext up for Hukkoo and team is fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), an area he confides he also wasn\u2019t aware of before a potential project came his way. \u201cImagine a world in which hacking is a thing of the past,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause all your data was stored encrypted and you could operate on encrypted data.\u201d FHE makes computation of encrypted data possible \u2014 and if data is never decrypted, it\u2019s always safe.
\nAs announced last year under the DARPA DPRIVE program, Intel plans to design an ASIC accelerator to reduce the performance overhead currently associated with fully homomorphic encryption. Hukkoo\u2019s team is part of a cross-Intel effort to bring it to life.
\n\u201cI like to work at the inception of new concepts and new ideas and nurture new businesses,\u201d Hukkoo says. \u201cThat\u2019s who I am. I\u2019m always grateful to Intel to let me do this because most companies would not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Above, image credited to Intel<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Behind the builders: Ajat Hukkoo leads an Intel team that \u2018builds accelerators in an accelerated manner.\u2019 The Intel Blockscale ASIC fits the bill on both fronts It all started with a curious email to Ajat Hukkoo. \u201cI was trying to build new businesses and my boss\u2019s technical assistant sent me an email saying, \u2018Well, there … <\/p>\n

Continue reading \u00abHow a small Intel team built a blockchain chip\u00bb<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[41,57,59,67],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9359"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9361,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359\/revisions\/9361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomkh.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}