 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Semiconductors |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Founders |
|
| Headquarters | , |
Key people |
|
| Products | IPU, Poplar |
| Revenue | US$2.7 million (2022) [1] |
| US$−205 million (2022) [1] | |
Number of employees | 494 (2023) [1] |
| Website | www |
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. [2]
Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon. [3]
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. [4] [5]
In July 2017, Graphcore secured a round B funding led by Atomico, [6] which was followed a few months later by $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. [7]
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. [8]
On 13 November 2019, Graphcore announced that their Graphcore C2 IPUs were available for preview on Microsoft Azure. [9]
Meta Platforms acquired the AI networking technology team from Graphcore in early 2023. [10]
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. [11] [12]
In 2016, Graphcore announced the world's first graph tool chain designed for machine intelligence called Poplar Software Stack. [13] [14] [15]
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. [16] [17] 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. [16] The device relies on scratchpad memory for its performance rather than traditional cache hierarchies. [18]
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. [19] 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. [20] Graphcore aims at a Good machine, named after I.J. Good, enabling AI models with more parameters than the human brain has synapses. [20]
| Release date | Product | Process node | Cores | Threads | Transistors | teraFLOPS (FP16) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 2017 | Colossus™ MK1 - GC2 IPU | 16 nm TSMC | 1216 | 7296 | ? | ~100-125 [21] |
| July 2020 | Colossus™ MK2 - GC200 IPU | 7 nm TSMC | 1472 | 8832 | 59 billion | ~250-280 [22] |
| Colossus™ MK3 | ~500 [23] |
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), [24] 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. [25] 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 ]
Intel Corporation (a portmanteau of "(int)egrated (el)ectronics") is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components and related products for business and consumer markets. It is considered one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue and ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018. In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the 7th-largest technology company in the ranking.
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
IPU may refer to:
Xilinx, Inc. was an American technology and semiconductor company that primarily supplied programmable logic devices. The company is renowned for inventing the first commercially viable field-programmable gate array (FPGA). It also pioneered the first fabless manufacturing model.
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) is a partially state-owned publicly listed Chinese pure-play semiconductor foundry company. It is the largest contract chip maker in mainland China.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
Scratchpad memory (SPM), also known as scratchpad, scratchpad RAM or local store in computer terminology, is an internal memory, usually high-speed, used for temporary storage of calculations, data, and other work in progress. In reference to a microprocessor, scratchpad refers to a special high-speed memory used to hold small items of data for rapid retrieval. It is similar to the usage and size of a scratchpad in life: a pad of paper for preliminary notes or sketches or writings, etc. When the scratchpad is a hidden portion of the main memory then it is sometimes referred to as bump storage.
In computing, CUDA is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated general-purpose processing, an approach called general-purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU). CUDA API and its runtime: The CUDA API is an extension of the C programming language that adds the ability to specify thread-level parallelism in C and also to specify GPU device specific operations. CUDA is a software layer that gives direct access to the GPU's virtual instruction set and parallel computational elements for the execution of compute kernels. In addition to drivers and runtime kernels, the CUDA platform includes compilers, libraries and developer tools to help programmers accelerate their applications.
Achronix Semiconductor Corporation is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California with an additional R&D facility in Bangalore, India, and an additional sales office in Shenzhen, China. Achronix is a diversified fabless semiconductor company that sells FPGA products, embedded FPGA (eFPGA) products, system-level products and supporting design tools. Achronix was founded in 2004 in Ithaca, New York based on technology licensed from Cornell University. In 2006, Achronix moved its headquarters to Silicon Valley.
Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google for neural network machine learning, using Google's own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs internally in 2015, and in 2018 made them available for third-party use, both as part of its cloud infrastructure and by offering a smaller version of the chip for sale.
Kalray is a French fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Montbonnot, France.
Epyc is a brand of multi-core x86-64 microprocessors designed and sold by AMD, based on the company's Zen microarchitecture. Introduced in June 2017, they are specifically targeted for the server and embedded system markets.
The Apple A11 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series, and manufactured by TSMC. It first appeared in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and iPhone X which were introduced on September 12, 2017. Apple states that the two high-performance cores are 25% faster than the Apple A10's and the four high-efficiency cores are up to 70% faster than the two corresponding cores in the A10. The A11 Bionic chip was discontinued on April 15, 2020, following the discontinuation of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. The latest software update for the iPhone 8 & 8 Plus and iPhone X using this chip was iOS 16.7.10, released on September 3, 2024.
The Pixel Visual Core (PVC) is a series of ARM-based system in package (SiP) image processors designed by Google. The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in future for IoT. It first appeared in the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL which were introduced on October 19, 2017. It has also appeared in the Google Pixel 3 and 3 XL. Starting with the Pixel 4, this chip was replaced with the Pixel Neural Core.
Ampere Computing LLC is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California that develops processors for servers operating in large scale environments. It was founded in 2017 by Renée James.
Cerebras Systems Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company with offices in Sunnyvale, San Diego, Toronto, and Bangalore, India. Cerebras builds computer systems for complex AI deep learning applications.
The Apple A16 Bionic is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., part of the Apple silicon series, and manufactured by TSMC. It is used in iPhones 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max, and 15 and 15 Plus.
Shanghai Biren Intelligent Technology Co. is a Chinese fabless semiconductor design company. The company was founded in 2019 by Lingjie Xu and others, all of whom were previously employed at NVIDIA or Alibaba or ST. Biren has advertised two general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), the BR100 and BR104. Both cards are aimed at artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.
Meteor Lake is the codename for Core Ultra Series 1 mobile processors, designed by Intel and officially released on December 14, 2023. It is the first generation of Intel mobile processors to use a chiplet architecture which means that the processor is a multi-chip module. Meteor Lake's design effort was led by Tim Wilson.
Groq, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) company that builds an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that they call the Language Processing Unit (LPU) and related hardware to accelerate the inference performance of AI workloads.
Differentiable computing | |
|---|---|
| General | |
| Hardware | |
| Software libraries | |
| |
