Bitmain’s Antminer E9 Miner For Sale – Ethereum mining

Why it matters: Bitmain, the Chinese crypto mining company, has teased its upcoming Antminer E9 Ethereum mining box. Not only is this welcome news for miners, it could potentially benefit PC gamers as the machine can mine at a hash rate equivalent to 32 GeForce RTX 3080s working simultaneously.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the Antminer E9 has a rate of 3 GH/s, making it faster than the Linzhi’s Phoenix Ethash ASIC miner that manages up to 2,600 MH/s. Additionally, Bitmain’s offering uses less power—2,556W—than the Linzhi machine’s 3,000W.

For reference, we recently observed the RTX 3080 Ti’s Ethereum mining performance (probably without the limiter): 118.9 MH/s, which puts it ahead of the RTX 3080’s 95 MH/s and slightly behind the RTX 3090’s 120 MH/s to 125 MH/s.

Of course, an ASIC miner with the mining power of several RTX 3080 GPUs will come at a premium. The price has been speculated to be between $20,000 and $40,000, however with the RTX 3080’s eBay pricing being approximately $2,000-$2,500, 32 of the cards would cost $64,000 to $80,000. The Phoenix miner from Linzhi costs between $11,300 and $13,700.

The Antminer E9’s debut might provide Ethereum miners less of an incentive to buy the handful RTX 3000-series cards that are still available.

There is, however, a caveat beyond the price: the global chip shortage will almost certainly prevent Bitmain’s rig from being mass-produced in sufficient numbers to meet demand, as is the case with every other ASIC miner at the moment. Furthermore, miners account for only a minor portion of the availability issue. Even so, every little bit helps.