Graphcore, a UK-based startup, launched its first Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) for AI acceleration in 2018. Today it introduced its second-generation product for AI, a massively parallel chip with 59.4 billion transistors that delivers some 250 Trillion Operations per Second (TOPS).
However, the company’s potential to challenge NVIDIA, the leader in data center AI, lies not just in the new chip’s performance, but in the new IPU-Machine, Poplar software and interconnect fabric. Together, these elements promise to provide the scalability necessary to handle massive AI models. While we must await real application performance comparisons to assess the platform’s true capabilities, Graphcore’s new offering potentially represents the first candidate capable of challenging NVIDIA’s new Ampere-based A100, at least for very large-scale AI models. Time will tell if that is good enough to overcome NVIDIA’s massive lead in software and AI ecosystem, but investors certainly believe in the company — they have bid up Graphcore’s value to nearly $2B.
Read The Full Article