Graphcore

Last updated
Graphcore Limited
Company type Private
Industry Semiconductors
Founded2016;9 years ago (2016)
Founders
  • Nigel Toon
  • Simon Knowles
Headquarters
Bristol
,
United Kingdom
Key people
  • Nigel Toon (CEO)
  • Simon Knowles (CTO)
ProductsIPU, Poplar
RevenueUS$2.7 million (2022) [1]
US$−205 million (2022) [1]
Number of employees
450 (2024) [2]
Website graphcore.ai

Graphcore Limited is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It has introduced a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor. [3]

Contents

History

Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon. [4]

In the autumn of 2016, Graphcore secured a first funding round led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Other backers included Samsung, Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, and Pitango. [5] [6]

In July 2017, Graphcore secured a round B funding led by Atomico, [7] which was followed a few months later by $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. [8]

In December 2018, Graphcore closed its series D with $200 million raised at a $1.7 billion valuation, making the company a unicorn. Investors included Microsoft, Samsung and Dell Technologies. [9]

On 13 November 2019, Graphcore announced that their Graphcore C2 IPUs were available for preview on Microsoft Azure. [10]

Meta Platforms acquired the AI networking technology team from Graphcore in early 2023. [11]

In July 2024, Softbank Group agreed to acquire Graphcore for around $500 million. The deal is under review by the UK's Business Department's investment security unit. [12] [13]

Products

In 2016, Graphcore announced the world's first graph tool chain designed for machine intelligence called Poplar Software Stack. [14] [15] [16]

In July 2017, Graphcore announced its first chip, called the Colossus GC2, a "16 nm massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor", that became available in 2018. [17] [18] Packaged with two chips on a single PCI Express card, called the Graphcore C2 IPU (an Intelligence Processing Unit), it is stated to perform the same role as a GPU in conjunction with standard machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow. [17] The device relies on scratchpad memory for its performance rather than traditional cache hierarchies. [19]

In July 2020, Graphcore presented its second generation processor called GC200, built with TSMC's 7nm FinFET manufacturing process. GC200 is a 59 billion transistor, 823 square-millimeter integrated circuit with 1,472 computational cores and 900 Mbyte of local memory. [20] In 2022, Graphcore and TSMC presented the Bow IPU, a 3D package of a GC200 die bonded face to face to a power-delivery die that allows for higher clock rate at lower core voltage. [21] Graphcore aims at a Good machine, named after I.J. Good, enabling AI models with more parameters than the human brain has synapses. [21]

Release dateProductProcess nodeCoresThreadsTransistorsteraFLOPS (FP16)
July 2017Colossus™ MK1 - GC2 IPU16 nm TSMC12167296 ?~100-125 [22]
July 2020Colossus™ MK2 - GC200 IPU7 nm TSMC1472883259 billion~250-280 [23]
Colossus™ MK3~500 [24]

Both the older and newer chips can use 6 threads per tile[ clarification needed ] (for a total of 7,296 and 8,832 threads, respectively) "MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) parallelism and has distributed, local memory as its only form of memory on the device" (except for registers).[ citation needed ] The older GC2 chip has 256 KiB per tile while the newer GC200 chip has about 630 KiB per tile that are arranged into islands (4 tiles per island), [25] that are arranged into columns, and latency is best within tile.[ clarification needed ][ citation needed ] The IPU uses IEEE FP16, with stochastic rounding, and also single-precision FP32, at lower performance. [26] Code and data executed locally must fit in a tile, but with message-passing, all on-chip or off-chip memory can be used, and software for AI makes it transparently possible,[ clarification needed ] e.g. has PyTorch support.[ citation needed ]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Cherney, Max A. (5 October 2023). "Losses widen, cash needed at chip startup Graphcore, an Nvidia rival, filing shows". Reuters.
  2. ↑ Sun, Yazhou (7 November 2024). "Chip Designer Graphcore Boosts Staff 20% After SoftBank Purchase". Bloomberg News.
  3. ↑ Peter Clarke (2016-11-01). "AI Chip Startup Shares Insights: "Very large" FinFET chip in the works at TSMC". eetimes. Retrieved 2017-08-02.
  4. ↑ Jolly, Jasper (2020-12-29). "UK chipmaker Graphcore valued at $2.8bn after it raises $222m". The Guardian .
  5. ↑ Arjun Kharpal (2016-10-31). "AI chipmaker Graphcore raises $30 million to take on Intel". CNBC. Retrieved 2017-07-31.
  6. ↑ Madhumita Murgia (2016-10-31). "UK chip start-up Graphcore raises £30m for take on AI giants". Financial Times. Retrieved 2017-08-02.
  7. ↑ Jeremy Kahn and Ian King (2017-07-20). "U.K. Chip Designer Graphcore Gets $30 Million to Fund Expansion". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2017-07-31.
  8. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (2017-11-12). "Graphcore raises $50M amid a flurry of AI chip activity". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  9. ↑ "AI chip startup Graphcore closes $200M Series D, adds BMW and Microsoft as strategic investors". TechCrunch. 18 December 2018. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  10. ↑ Toon, Nigel. "Microsoft and Graphcore collaborate to accelerate Artificial Intelligence". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  11. ↑ Paul, Katie (5 May 2023). "Meta Platforms scoops up AI networking chip team from Graphcore". Reuters.
  12. ↑ Nicol-Schwarz, Kai (9 July 2024). "Graphcore employees have share value wiped as sale to SoftBank agreed". Sifted.
  13. ↑ Titcomb, James; Field, Matthew (1 July 2024). "Japanese deal for AI champion Graphcore faces national security review". The Daily Telegraph.
  14. ↑ Fyles, Matt. "Inside an AI 'brain' - What does machine learning look like?". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  15. ↑ Doherty, Sally. "Introducing Poplar® - our IPU-Processor software at NeurIPS". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  16. ↑ Fyles, Matt. "Graph computing for machine intelligence with Poplar™". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  17. 1 2 Trader, Tiffany (2017-07-20). "Graphcore Readies Launch of 16nm Colossus-IPU Chip". hpcwire.com. HPC Wire. Retrieved 2017-12-11.
  18. ↑ Lucchesi, Ray (2018-11-19). "New GraphCore GC2 chips with 2PFlop performance in a Dell Server". silvertonconsulting.com. Silverton Consulting. Retrieved 2018-12-16.
  19. ↑ Citadel High Performance Computing R&D Team (2019). "Dissecting the Graphcore IPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking" (PDF).
  20. ↑ "Graphcore Introducing 2nd Generation IPU Systems For AI At Scale" . Retrieved 2020-08-09.
  21. 1 2 Timothy Prickett Morgan: GraphCore Goes Full 3D With AI Chips. The Next Platform, March 3, 2022.
  22. ↑ Kennedy, Patrick (2019-06-07). "Hands-on With a Graphcore C2 IPU PCIe Card at Dell Tech World". ServeTheHome. Retrieved 2023-06-26.
  23. ↑ Ltd, Graphcore. "IPU Processors". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2023-06-26.
  24. ↑ "ScalAH22: 13th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Systems". www.csm.ornl.gov. Retrieved 2023-06-26.
  25. ↑ Jia, Zhe; Tillman, Blake; Maggioni, Marco; Daniele Paolo Scarpazza (2019). "Dissecting theGraphcore IPUArchitecturevia Microbenchmarking". arXiv: 1912.03413 [cs.DC].
  26. ↑ "THE GRAPHCORE SECOND GENERATION IPU" (PDF).

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