Bitmain seen launching an Ethereum mining ASIC as early as April

DigiTimes heard TSMC is seeing strong orders from Bitmain. This Chinese company is one of the largest Bitcoin miners and the largest seller of Bitcoin mining hardware. Bitmain is estimated to have a 70 percent marketshare in the cryptocurrency mining ASIC market. The second largest supplier is Canaan, while Ebang ranks third.

Perhaps interesting for gamers is that Bitmain is planning to launch an Ethereum mining ASIC product, possibly as early as April. If this product performs well, it could relieve pressure on the overheated video card market.

TSMC chairman Morris Chang previously said that the company is expected to see 10-15% on-year growth in 2018 revenues driven by three major applications: high-performance computing (HPC), car-use electronics and Internet of Things (IoT). Bitmain's orders are expected to become a new revenue booster for the foundry in 2018.

Bitmain, which has already been supplying mining ASICs for Bitcoin in the past several years and is one of the top-5 clients of TSMC, is ready to release ASIC products for mining the cryptocurrency Ether in April at the earliest. The products are expected to shore up the performances of related upstream suppliers including TSMC, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and Global Unichip (GUC).