Bitmain, the world’s largest producer of cryptocurrency mining hardware, plans to release a new ASIC model on 5 nm chips. The news was broken by Bitmain founder Jihan Wu at the Coingeek Conference in Hong Kong earlier this week.

The current Antminer S19 runs on 14nm chips, criticized for their high energy consumption. The new device will use 5nm chips, which will make it the most energy-efficient ASIC miner on the market yet. However, this comes at a cost; using such small chips usually yields very reduced mining capacity.

Despite this drawback, Wu seems to be confident that the Antminer S19 XP for sale (or whatever it will be called) will have a high chance of success, as it is the only device that would sell at a higher price than current models.

One of Bitmain’s main competitors, Halong Mining, has been working on its own 5nm ASIC miners for over a year now. Their first production run was scheduled for June 2018, but it has been postponed to October 2018.

If Wu’s announcement is valid, Bitmain will beat Halong Mining to the market by several months. It should be noted that Bitmain has an important edge over other producers; at their disposal, they hold one of the largest pools of Bitcoin mining power — Antpool. This adds a valuable advantage in the form of more predictable revenue, which would give them more time to develop the 5nm chips.

The Antminer S19 was introduced in 2016 and is still one of Bitmain’s best-selling models, despite a significant decrease in its mining capacity compared to previous ASIC miner generations. It uses a 14nm chip that can do a hash rate of up to 13 TH/s.

It is still unclear if the new Antminer will be an upgrade or a replacement for the S19, but it seems that Bitmain is learning from its past mistakes; the hash rate will not be affected by this change. With 14nm chips, miners could mine at twice the speed of older models, but this decreased significantly over time.
On the other hand, with 5nm chips, there is no risk of mining power decreasing, regardless of the device’s age.