There is a lot riding on the use of artificial intelligence technology to help us take giant leaps ahead in solving complex challenges — whether it’s medical breakthroughs, building better cybersecurity, or better navigation systems for cars and other moving objects. But the more advanced the application, the bigger the need for hardware that can handle the calculations and processing; and that means the race is on for ever-more powerful processing. Now, the UK startup Graphcore is announcing its latest contribution to that effort.
Today, it is announcing a new chip, the GC200, and a new IPU Machine that runs on it, the M2000, which Graphcore says is the first AI computer to achieve a petaflop of processing power “in the size of a pizza box.”
Graphcore says that there are no plans for the GC200 to be sold separately, and it will come only in the M2000. Nigel Toon, the CEO and co-founder, said the M2000 is now shipping to early access customers and will be more widely by the end of this year to customers in applications in areas like financial services, healthcare, technology and more, “wherever AI is used.”
This is the second generation of Graphcore’s hardware to be released, and its first in just under two years, Toon notes.
The IPU Machine uses four of the 7nm GC200 IPU chips, with the GC200 featuring 59.4 billion transistors on each chip. Potentially, Graphcore says that up to 64,000 IPUs can be connected together to create a vast parallel processor of up to 16 exaflops of computing power and petabytes of memory to support models with trillions of parameters. The idea is that these can be scaled up as necessary.
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