Bitmain which is one of the market leaders in the bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer space, unveiled that it will begin the sale of Antminer R4 today at 23:00 (GMT+8).

The official announcement stated that each Antminer R4 employs 126 of Bitmain's BM1387 chip that is built using TSMC's 16nm FinFET technology and is considered as the world's most efficient bitcoin mining chip in the consumer market. By integrating the chips, Antminer R4 delivers more hashrate and efficiency than any bitcoin miner except the Antminer S9.

“R4 is the second most powerful bitcoin miner in the world and that it will seek to reach enthusiasts with its production,” Bitmain representatives said to coindesk.com in a mail.

To do away with the traditional noisy fan, Bitmain has designed a new fan, inspired by the “fan” of a silent split air conditioner. The fan can make less than half the noise of the standard miner fan and its speed is automatically controlled to ensure that it never creates more noise than is absolutely necessary.

Other features include a special-design control board in order to reduce latency. The board integrates a feature-rich dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based processing system (PS) as well as a 28 nm Xilinx programmable logic (PL) in a single device. It supports Gigabit Ethernet to ensure that mined blocks are submitted instantly.

According to Bitmain, R4 is meticulously designed for homes. "Producing a sound that’s usually less than 52dB, the R4 manages to deliver a monstrous hashrate of 8.6TH/swith a sound level unseen since the existence of 1TH/s bitcoin miners.With a height of 100mm, it is slim enough to rest comfortably in your book rack or computer table," it added.

After accessing the Antminer’s user interface, users have to enter their wallet address and mining pool settings in order to start mining. The user interface can be upgraded and allows customized settings including fan speed or frequency. R4 also consists of optional custom-built PSU for further noise reduction.

Bitmain in May released their S9 model, the world’s first Bitcoin miner using 16nm chips.