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Chinese startup Zhonghao Xinying is offering a home-grown General Purpose Tensor Processing Unit (GPTPU) as an alternative to international AI training and inferencing hardware, like Nvidia's graphics cards, and Google's TPUs, as reported by the South China Morning Post. These ASIC chips are said to be up to 1.5 times faster than Nvidia's 2020 A100 release based on its Ampere architecture.
Although this is several years and generations behind the capabilities of the latest hardware from its international competition, this shows increasing competitiveness for global compute power and how China may have a path to silicon independence in the future as it explores both traditional GPU and ASIC designs as alternatives.
The "Ghana" chip was developed at the company by Yanggong Yifan, who previously attended Stanford and the University of Michigan to learn electrical engineering. He also worked on chip architectures at Google and Oracle, with specific design work on several generations of Google's TPUs. Co-founder Zheng Hanxun previously worked at Oracle and Samsung's Electronics research and development facility in Texas.
They claim the new TPU uses only self-controlled intellectual property for the core design, with no reliance on Western companies, software stacks, or components for development, design, or fabrication.
Although this is several years and generations behind the capabilities of the latest hardware from its international competition, this shows increasing competitiveness for global compute power and how China may have a path to silicon independence in the future as it explores both traditional GPU and ASIC designs as alternatives.
The "Ghana" chip was developed at the company by Yanggong Yifan, who previously attended Stanford and the University of Michigan to learn electrical engineering. He also worked on chip architectures at Google and Oracle, with specific design work on several generations of Google's TPUs. Co-founder Zheng Hanxun previously worked at Oracle and Samsung's Electronics research and development facility in Texas.
They claim the new TPU uses only self-controlled intellectual property for the core design, with no reliance on Western companies, software stacks, or components for development, design, or fabrication.
