Ever since Ethereum gained traction earlier this year, we've seen countless gaming graphics cards repurposed for mining, often in egregious quantities. With the silicon shortage expected to persist through 2021, miners may have to look at GPU alternatives. Here's where ASICs (application-specific integrated circiut) come in. Bitmain, a company specialising in crypto-specific ASICs, has launched the new Antminer E9 (via Videocardz) tailor-made for Ethereum.

The Bitmain Antminer E9 directly succeeds the Antminer E3 from earlier. It comes with significant upgrades across the board, including a hash rate of 3GH/s, which is quite a step up from the E3's 180MH/s. That extra performance comes at an exceptionally high power draw of 2,665W. The Antminer E9 offers 32 times more processing power than the GeForce RTX 3080 (94MH/s at 320W TDP) at less than half of the power budget. Then again, graphics cards can also play games, something that ASICs cannot do.