Baikal Giant-N, The First Cryptonight ASIC Miner

Baikal Miner has started selling their new Baikal Giant-N ASIC miner and it is the first Cryptonight and Cryptonight-light ASIC miner on the market, essentially taking away another algorithm from GPU miners. The Cryptonight algorithm was mostly in the domain of AMD GPUs as they were performing faster than Nvidia price/performance wise, but now that is about to end apparently. With 20 KH/s hashrate for Cryptonight and 40 KH/s for Cryptonight-lite at just 60 Watts of power usage any GPU feels out of date already, even AMD’s VEGA GPUs with just about 2 KH/s are not interesting for mining these algorithms anymore. So Monero (XMR) is going to become the next major ASIC only coin with the many Cryptonight-based alternatives following when the Giant-N miners start hitting the market, unless of course they fork to another algorithm.

The price of the new Baikal Giant-N ASIC miner is not listed on the website, but if you request a quote you will get a $3600 USD price with a minimum order quantity of 6 devices and the devices are apparently shipping already. It already seems that Monero (XMR) could be the first one to fork to a new version of the algorithm that will net be mineable by this new ASIC device and if others coins follow you may actually end up with an expensive piece of hardware that might not be very usable, so be careful if you are considering to buy one or more of these ASIC miners.

– Visit the official Baikal Miner Giant-N Cryptonight ASIC miner product page for more details…