Graphcore, makers of a giant chip dedicated to AI, has entered the system business. The company makes the case its computers are vastly cheaper than equivalent processing power from Nvidia.
Graphcore, based in Bristol, U.K., which has received over $300 million in venture capital, unveiled what it calls the Mk2 GC200, or Mark-2, as the company refers to it, its latest processor dedicated to handling machine learning operations of neural networks. It also said that it will begin selling a four-chip computer called the M2000 that is housed in a standard 1U pizza box chassis.
"This is really what we've been working on since we started the company," Nigel Toon, chief executive of Graphcore, told ZDNet in an interview via Zoom.
Building its own computer is a departure for Graphcore from its existing business model, whereby the company sells a plug-in PCIe card that is meant to live inside someone else's server computer. Previously, Graphcore has partnered with Dell to develop systems from those cards.
But the increasing need to cluster machines meant that someone had to solve the scaling of chips into very large systems, said Toon.
"The key is that you know people want to do really big models," said Toon, referring to neural network computer models in artificial intelligence. Increasingly, programs from Google and others are so compute-intensive that they can require dozens or hundreds of chips working on parallel. Toon has previously told ZDNet such models are better-suited by Graphcore's approach to processing.
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