Microprocessor designing company GraphCore debuts in the 3D artificial intelligence (AI) chip sector with its new Wafer-on-Wafer technology.
GraphCore has collaborated with global semiconductor manufacturing giant TSMC to develop the new technology. Moreover, TSMC also manufactures processors for GraphCore. According to the company, its new hip named Bow is the first in the world to use the Wafer-on-Wafer technology.
For real-world AI applications, Graphcore’s new Bow IPU processor can handle up to 350 trillion processing operations per second, providing up to 40% higher performance and 16% better power efficiency than its predecessors.
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Bow Pod256 provides over 89 PetaFLOPS of AI computation, while the superscale Bow POD1024 provides 350 PetaFLOPS of AI computation. This enables machine learning researchers to keep up with the continually rising size of AI models while also achieving new levels of machine intelligence.
Bow Pod is now available, and the company has started shipping the product across the globe. The United States Department of Energy has become one of the first customers of GraphCore’s newly launched product.
Co-founders of GraphCore said, “One wafer for AI processing, which is architecturally compatible with the GC200 IPU processor with 1,472 independent IPU-Core tiles, capable of running more than 8,800 threads, with 900MB of In-Processor Memory, and a second wafer with power delivery die.”
They further added that two wafers are joined together to create a new 3D die in the BOW IPU with Wafer-on-Wafer technology.
United Kingdom-based microprocessor designing firm GraphCore was founded by Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles in 2016. The company specializes in designing processors and intelligent processing units for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. Earlier this year, GraphCore also opened its first office in India while the country is witnessing an artificial intelligence revolution.
To date, GraphCore has raised more than $680 million from investors like Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity International, and many others over seven funding rounds.
