Graphcore, a well-funded and ambitious British chip designer that focuses solely on AI applications, has unveiled what it says is the world’s most complex chip: the Colossus MK2 or GC200 IPU.
The processor has 59.4 billion transistors and offers an eight times performance increase from the company’s Colossus MK1, says Graphcore. It boasts more than the 54 billion transistors found in Nvidia’s A100, which previously held the title as the world’s largest processor, and which the American firm announced earlier this year.
Each GC200 chip has 1,472 independent processor cores and 8,832 separate parallel threads, all supported by 900MB of in-processor RAM. Graphcore will be making the GC200 available via its new IPU Machine, the M2000, which contains four GC200 chips in a package the size of a pizza box and which delivers 1 petaflop of total compute. The firm says its new hardware is “completely plug-and-play” and that customers will be able to connect up to 64,000 IPUs together for a total of 16 exaflops of computing power.
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