Recently, Shanghai Tianshu Zhixin semiconductor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Tianshu Zhixinhan”), a domestic chip company, announced that the company’s flagship 7-nanometer general-purpose parallel (GPGPU) cloud computing chip BI has been successfully “lighted up” recently.
In the GPGPU market, where foreign giants occupy the majority of the market share, Tianshu Zhixin can be described as “artistic and bold.”
Successfully “lit” BI chips
It is reported that the BI chip is the first fully self-developed 7nm GPGPU training chip based on the GPU architecture in China. After mass production, it will be widely used in AI training, high-performance computing (HPC) and other scenarios, serving education, Internet , finance, autonomous driving, medical care, security and other related industries, empowering the AI intelligent society.
Zheng Jinshan, co-founder and chief scientist of Tianshu Zhixin, introduced that Tianshu Zhixin began to design BI products in June 2018, tape-out in May 2020, returned to the film in November, and successfully “lit up” in December of that year. “.
In the past month or so, the technical team of Tianshu Zhixin has conducted a series of tests on nearly 100 indicators such as hardware and software to verify that the actual functions of BI products meet the design standards.
Compared with the existing mainstream products in the market, BI chips can provide flexible programming capabilities, stronger performance, and attractive cost-effectiveness, and are safe domestic chip solutions. The BI chip uses 7nm process and 2.5DCoWoS packaging technology, accommodates 24 billion transistors, supports FP32, FP/BF16, INT32/16/8 and other multi-precision data hybrid training, supports high-speed inter-chip interconnection, and a single chip can perform 1.47 million per second With 100 million FP16 calculations ([email protected]), it can complete the artificial intelligence processing of hundreds of camera video channels per second, and its performance is twice that of mainstream products in the market.
For a start-up company, choosing to make 7-nanometer products directly in 2018 is actually a very bold behavior. After all, betting on more advanced technology to directly make high-end products means that risks and costs will increase significantly.
Zheng Jinshan pointed out that making products should not only look at the immediate space, but also consider the long-term future. For them at that time, the realization process of 7-nanometer products may be more difficult, but it takes time from design to mass production. Competitors with advanced manufacturing process.
If the chip design is not well thought out at the beginning, the cost will be too high to reinvent the wheel, especially for high-end chips. According to statistics, the industry’s tape-out market is that the cost of a large company is about 10 million US dollars, while a startup company’s one-time tape-out is as high as 15 million to 20 million US dollars.
Zou Wei, product director of Tianshu Zhixin, added that, more importantly, the advanced process is not too difficult for Tianshu Zhixin, because some of the company’s engineers have experience in high-end chip design and production, so, When choosing an advanced process, there is a bottom line in mind.
“China Core” to fill the gap in the market
How big is the market for such a product? Cai Quangen pointed out that the domestic GPGPU training chip market alone reached about 8.6 billion last year. With such a huge market demand and an unstable international situation, domestic manufacturers are in urgent need of a real “Chinese chip”.
Prior to this, the capital environment of the domestic semiconductor industry was immature, and there were not many talents engaged in related industries. Most of them were gathered in foreign companies. Without the support of funds and talents, the development of the industry was very difficult. In the past two years, the policy has begun to be favorable, funds have begun to flow in, and many talents have begun to return to China, and Tianshu Zhixin was born.
The BI chips created by Tianshu Zhixin have performance that is not inferior to those of the giants. Zheng Jinshan explained that, specifically, the GPUs originally designed by the giants were designed for graphics processing and games. Tianshu Zhixin’s GPGPU removed the GPU. The graphics rendering part is directly optimized for cloud computing and AI training, and the chip can achieve a smaller area and stronger performance.
At the same time, BI chips also have their own product characteristics – universality and migration, and have their own advantages in terms of cost performance, local services, and flexible customization.
Today, the chip has been successfully “lit up” and will be mass-produced soon. It has high performance, versatility and flexibility, and can provide artificial intelligence and related vertical application industries with computing power that matches the rapid development of the industry, and through standardized software and hardware ecological interfaces for the application industry. and other practical pain points at the operational level.
With the official launch of this independent and reliable high-end chip into the market, it will break the long-term monopoly of foreign companies and bring more leisurely choices to Chinese companies, which is of epoch-making significance for promoting the development of the digital economy and industry.
Tianshu Zhixin’s “Diamond Diamond”
As the saying goes: “Don’t work on porcelain without diamonds”, Tianshu Zhixin, as a domestic start-up company, can successfully enter the GPGPU track, not by a certain advantage, but by the “advantage set” of the company. Cai Quangen, chairman of Tianshu Zhixin, pointed out that Tianshu Zhixin is a company with a “advantage set” composed of five advantages, which is the company’s “diamond”.
The first is corporate culture. Cai Quangen said that Tianshu Zhixin has the cultural advantages of distinct engineer characteristics, and has the core values of self-improvement, innovation, truth-seeking, ingenuity and tolerance. The company has about 85% of software and hardware engineers. These talents have the quality of self-improvement, pragmatism and truth-seeking, and tolerance for exhibitions. These talents gather together and form the cultural advantage of Tianshuren.
The second point is the strong technical research and development capabilities. Cai Quangen said that the engineers of Tianshu Zhixin have an average of more than 10 years of industry work experience, and more than 65% of the talents have a master’s degree or above. Some of these talents have strong technical capabilities and have led the chip team to successfully tap-out until mass production many times. The strong technical strength brought by these talents has made Tianshu Zhixin a successful tape-out within 2 years, and the efficiency is three times that of foreign companies.
The third point is good customer resources. Tianshu Zhixin has established a capable market development and customer service team. So far, customer docking work has involved eight vertical industries such as Internet, artificial intelligence, finance, transportation, etc. Will continue to promote education, medical, intelligent manufacturing and other fields. Tianshu Zhixin has also carried out in-depth cooperation with well-known domestic server manufacturers, forming a unique “triangular” market ecological structure. Personalized solutions and flexible pricing strategies have laid a good foundation for the market development of Tianshu Zhixin.
The fourth point is rich management experience. Tianshu Zhixin has an excellent and capable management team who understands the industrial development strategy and the needs of engineers. They mainly come from excellent enterprises at home and abroad, and have rich experience in enterprise management and good professionalism. Background, understand the management focus of technology enterprises, understand the basic values, ideas and their needs and behaviors of engineers. Cai Quangen emphasized that the management team of Tianshu Zhixin has strong industrial development insight ability, strategic decision-making ability, tactical landing ability and method.
The last is the advantages of good ecological construction and ecological integration. The ecological strategy includes technology ecology, industrial ecology, factor ecology and market ecology.
Its technical ecology is fully compatible with the international mainstream GPU software ecology, which brings great help to customers’ migration and efficiency improvement, and also conducts in-depth software cooperation with relevant domestic universities;
In terms of industrial ecology, Tianshu Zhixin has reached in-depth cooperation with downstream board and server manufacturers to define products together with cooperative manufacturers. In-depth cooperation with server equipment manufacturers based on GPGPU chips to solve the problem of server adaptation;
In terms of element ecology, Tianshu Zhixin has cooperated with national scientific research and engineering technology institutions in the direction of technological development, and has carried out research and discussion on artificial intelligence with well-known domestic universities. At the same time, it has carried out industrial landing and computing power sharing with relevant provinces and cities. cooperate.
In terms of market ecology, as mentioned above, it has connected with eight major industries and more than 40 enterprises for market development.
The comprehensive capabilities of the above five aspects constitute the advantages of Tianshu Zhixin’s development. Cai Quangen emphasized that Tianshu Zhixin will continue to build this “advantage set”.
Summarize
Entrepreneurship is an extremely difficult road, especially high-tech entrepreneurship. In the interview of Semiconductor Industry Observer, Cai Quangen did not emphasize how many difficulties the product development has encountered so far. He said that Tianshu Zhixin has been moving forward, and no matter how difficult it is, there is no turning back, because they choose an industry with no end.
No matter how hard the process is, when the product is continuously polished and successfully mass-produced for the market to accept, it must be full of great sense of achievement.
In the opinion of the semiconductor industry observers, when there are “days and smart cores” that fill the gaps in the industry one after another, my country’s semiconductor industry will also truly prosper.
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