How a small Intel team built a blockchain chip

by Arthur · September 7, 2022

It all started with a curious email to Ajat Hukkoo.

“I was trying to build new businesses and my boss’ technical assistant sent me an email saying, ‘Well, there’s this thing called bitcoin, what about it?’ Do you do anything about it? Are you thinking about it?

“And to be honest, I wasn’t.”

In June, a couple of years and a global pandemic away from the original email, Intel began sending Intel® Blockscale^TM ASIC, a small – as in approx. 10 fits on a US postage stamp – 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 of the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group (AXG).

(Photo: Intel Corporation)

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Acceleration, accelerated

Digging into it, Hukkoo discovered it our others at Intel are looking at blockchains, some who had even built basic technology that could be used. What was missing, however, was a product and a route to market. That’s where Hukkoo’s team comes in.

“We build accelerators in an accelerated way,” he explains.

Blockscale meets the standard on both fronts. Capable of performing trillions of computing operations every second, it hit the market less than a year after the team finalized the design.

Each Blockscale chip contains hundreds of small mathematical engines, originally developed in Intel Labs, that handle the cryptographic hash function used in the mining process. A mining rig will then combine a few hundred of these pieces in a metal box not much bigger than a typical lunch pail.

Some cryptocurrencies can be minted via computationally demanding mathematics (a process called cryptomining). Blockscale aims to make the cryptomining hardware business — trending toward $11 billion in annual revenue by 2025 — more adaptable, flexible and efficient.

What’s remarkable about the speed and quality of the Blockscale project is that it’s an entirely off-roadmap product for a nascent Intel market, and also that the team didn’t just build a chip. They also built the boards that connect as many as 100 chips together, a controller that orchestrates them all, and the software that runs it. “It’s a complete solution,” confirms Hukkoo.

“Then we can go to our customers and say, ‘Here’s the chip and the reference board, so you can take our design and improve it, or you can take the design as it is and make your own systems out of it,'” explains Hukkoo.

Blockscale ASICs are now shipping in high volume, and as Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger explained to investors in July, “We expect to ship millions of units this year, not originally in our forecast.”

If software sells chips, make software first

A key to making everything work quickly—with a global team of a few dozen engineers—is parallel work similar to how a 300-chip mining rig runs. “I always follow what I call a platform-first approach, where we don’t build the chip in a vacuum,” says Hukkoo. “It’s always built with software in mind, because chips don’t sell themselves — it’s software on the chips that sells the chips.”

“We have the software architect on the chip from day one,” he adds, “to make sure what the hardware team builds is usable.” 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 production. That means the actual last piece “is usually the fourth thing the software team has seen.”

On the hardware side, the second priority in addition to faster math was to save power. “There is no other Intel product that comes with this ultra-low voltage,” notes Hukkoo, less than half the voltage of a typical Intel chip. To achieve that, the team had to take some risks. They took a leap of faith in a power-saving approach that Hukkoo describes as what an electrical engineering professor “would teach you about and then tell you not to use because it’s too risky.” But after a bunch of simulations and a successful test chip, “we knew we could build a product out of it.”

As a result, the Blockscale ASIC is both fast and flexible – it can run at a wide range of frequencies, enabling system designers to balance performance and efficiency.

Back to the start

“I like working on the small projects that have a directional impact on the company,” says Hukkoo. “I like to keep my teams small and have people do more than one job.” It prevents people from fighting over territory and opens up more opportunities to learn and try new things, he explains.

“I hire for interest and ability and not for what people know, because nobody knows everything. New fields emerge all the time, and you have to be able to absorb information and grow and make a contribution in those areas.”

Next up for Hukkoo and the team is fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), an area he admits he wasn’t aware of either until a potential project came his way. “Imagine a world where hacking is a thing of the past,” he says, “because all your data was stored encrypted and you could operate on encrypted data.” FHE makes computation of encrypted data possible – and if data is never decrypted, it is always safe.

As 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’s team is part of a cross-Intel effort to bring it to life.

“I like working at the inception of new concepts and new ideas and nurturing new businesses,” says Hukkoo. “It’s who I am. I’m forever grateful to Intel for letting me do this because most companies wouldn’t.”

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