Can Chinese AI chip companies shake up industry giant Huida?

1. Can Chinese AI chip companies shake up industry giant Huida? ;

Artificial intelligence has become the hottest trend of the moment, and companies from all walks of life are trying to improve productivity and competitive advantage through this technology.

In the field of chips, Huida is a leading hardware manufacturer and its influence cannot be ignored. Earlier, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a report that Huida will become the leading supplier of artificial intelligence chips, which is creating standards for the artificial intelligence computing industry.

In addition to Huida, a number of artificial intelligence chip startups have emerged in the past two years. They are eager to become the next Huida, but the real competition may come from established companies such as AMD and Google. China AI chip company.

In China today, artificial intelligence has risen to national strategy. According to the “New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” issued by the State Council in July 2017, the strategic goal of China's artificial intelligence in 2020 is that technology and applications are synchronized with the world's advanced level, and the artificial intelligence industry has become a new important economic growth point, the core industry. The scale exceeds 150 billion yuan, driving the related industries to exceed 1 trillion yuan.

So, how is the development of China’s AI chip company that catches up with the world? To what extent can they compete with Huida?

Huida: AI chip market leader

Huida is undoubtedly the undisputed leader in the AI ​​chip market. In 2017, Huida is a great sight. From games and data centers to artificial intelligence, the demand for Huida chips has risen all the way.

Because deep learning requires "violence" in computing speed, the Huida GPU chip can make a large number of processors parallel computing, ten times or even dozens faster than the CPU, thus becoming the majority of artificial intelligence researchers and developers. A must-have "nuclear bomb."

According to the news of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, almost all of the AI ​​entrepreneurs in China use Huida GPUs and platforms. It is normal for a small AI entrepreneurial team to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Huida chips.

Silicon Valley star investor Andreessen Horowitz also revealed: "We have invested in a large number of startups that do deep learning in all areas, each running on Huida's platform."

Affected by this, Huida's share price has also soared, from 20 US dollars in 2015 to more than 220 US dollars today, an increase of more than 1000%, the market value has exceeded 130 billion US dollars.

In addition to being at the forefront of the chip industry, Huida is also active in the field of game graphics and autopilot.

At the recent 2018 CES show, Huida released the latest 65-inch high-end gaming consoles, and Acer, Asus and HP will use their specifications and standards as 4K HDR displays. This ultra-large display is equipped with G-Sync, which is suitable for high-end gaming PC products.

In terms of autonomous driving, Huida’s founder, Huang Renxun, held a press conference in Las Vegas on the evening of January 7th to announce major cooperation projects with Flowserve and Uber. Huang Renxun also revealed that Huida currently has more than 320 cooperative enterprises and institutions in the field of automatic driving.

The strength of Huida in the field of artificial intelligence is evident.

AI chip chaser: Intel, AMD, Google

Huida is not the only giant in the GPU field, and Intel, AMD and Google also have advantages that cannot be ignored.

In the semiconductor market, Intel has been occupying a leading position for many years. However, the rise of artificial intelligence has made this world's largest personal computer parts and CPU manufacturers under severe challenges. Under this pressure, Intel chose to fight back and forth through a "strong alliance."

In December 2017, Intel and AMD, which have been fighting for more than 50 years, announced that they will jointly launch a notebook computer chip that combines Intel processors and AMD graphics units.

Wang Xiaolong, director of research at Keysight, said: "If Nvidia's revenue on PC GPUs is reduced, Nvidia's development in new markets will be diverted, so Intel chose to work with AMD."

Alan Priestley, research director at data research firm Gartner, also believes that the collaboration between Intel and AMD will have some impact on Nvida. "At present, the application area of ​​this chip jointly launched by Intel and AMD is also the application field of Nvidia GPU. Obviously. Intel processors have penetrated into this space, and with the new chips, AMD will gain a foothold in this area."

In addition, the second echelon of Google is also trying to trigger a new subversion.

In 2016, Google announced that it will independently develop a new processing system called TPU. The system is a dedicated chip designed specifically for machine learning applications. By reducing the computational accuracy of the chip and reducing the number of transistors required to implement each computational operation, the number of operations per second of the chip can be increased, allowing fine-tuned machine learning models to run on the chip. It's faster. Compared with CPU and GPU, TPU has improved efficiency by 15-30 times and performance by 30-80 times.

The rise of domestic AI chip makers

With the implementation of major strategies such as "Made in China 2025" and "Network Power", Chinese chip companies are also developing rapidly, and their strength cannot be underestimated.

Cambrian Technology

Cambrian is the world's first AI chip company to successfully streamline and have mature products. It has two product lines: terminal AI processor IP and cloud high-performance AI chip. The Cambrian 1A processor (Cambricon-1A) released in 2016 is the world's first commercial deep learning dedicated processor. The product was also selected as one of the 15 "World Network Leading Scientific and Technological Achievements" selected by the 3rd World Network Conference (Wuzhen). "."

The Cambrian team originated from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The latter is the first national academic institution specializing in the comprehensive research of calculator science and technology in China. A group of high-tech enterprises such as Lenovo and Shuguang were born from the institute. At present, it is also an important shareholder of Cambrian Technology and a long-term partner of industry, education and research.

In August 2017, Cambrian Technology completed a $100 million Series A round of financing, which was initiated by SDIC, Alibaba Venture Capital, Lenovo Venture Capital, Guoke Investment, Zhongke Turing, Yuanhe Origin, and Yongyu Investment. After this round of financing, the company became one of the "unicorns".

Huawei

According to 2017 data, Huawei has become China's largest and the world's third largest smartphone manufacturer. However, while developing mobile phones, Huawei is also developing artificial intelligence processors.

In September 2017, at the IFA exhibition in Berlin, Huawei officially released the latest Kirin 970 chip, which is Huawei's first artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The chip is the first to use TSMC's 10nm process, and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 835 chip is a process, but the integration of 5.5 billion transistors is much higher than the 3.1 billion of Qualcomm and the 3.3 million of the Apple A10, resulting in a reduction in power consumption of 20 %.

It is understood that Kirin 970 integrates the NPU (Neural Network Processing Unit) dedicated hardware processing unit for the first time based on the achievements of the past generations, and has designed the HiAI mobile computing architecture. Its AI performance density is much better than CPU and GPU.

In October of the same year, the Huawei Mate 10 equipped with the Kirin 970 was launched, becoming the first smart phone on the market with an AI chip.

Shen Jian Technology

Founded in 2016 by four scientists who graduated from Tsinghua University and Stanford University, Shenjian Technology is an artificial intelligence technology company focused on deep learning processor solutions dedicated to deep learning of processors and compilers. R&D, making it easy for all algorithm developers to use.

In October 2017, Shenjian Technology announced its chip plan. According to official information, the chips "Tiantao" and "Guanhai" independently developed by Shenjian will be launched in the third quarter of 2018. Among them, the "Tiantao" series chips use TSMC's 28-nanometer process. Aristotle's architecture, peak performance of 1.1 watts 4.1 TOPS, is expected to complete product loading in the first half of the year.

In addition, Shenjian Technology also announced the Deep Neural Network Development Kit - "DNNDK", a deep learning software development kit designed to simplify and accelerate the development of deep learning applications. This product not only greatly reduces the threshold for DHO platform deep learning application development and deployment, but also greatly shortens the cycle of algorithm deployment to hardware, and achieves the ultimate speed of product development in the AI ​​industry. Shen Jian, CEO of Shenjian Technology, said that DNNDK is the first deep learning development kit in China and can be used against the standard.

Due to its outstanding advantages in the AI ​​field, in October 2017, Shenjian Technology announced the completion of the latest round of financing of 40 million US dollars, led by Ant Financial and Samsung Electronics, China Merchants Venture Capital and Huachuang Capital. Previously, the company completed the Angel Wheel and A round of financing in May 2016 and May 2017, respectively.

Horizon robot

In 2015, former Vice President of Baidu Research, Yu Kai, founded the Horizon Robot and opened the way to study difficult processor chips based on deep neural network algorithms.

Two and a half years later, Horizon Robot announced on December 20, 2017 that it launched two embedded artificial intelligence vision chips for smart driving and smart cameras.

Among them, the embedded artificial intelligence visual chip for intelligent driving is named "Journey 1.0 processor", which supports high-performance L2 ADAS system; it can simultaneously target pedestrians, motor vehicles, lane lines, traffic signs, Real-time detection and identification of the preparation of Class 8 targets such as traffic lights.

The camera-oriented vision chip is named "Sunrize 1.0 Processor", which combines the depth learning algorithm of the horizon and can be widely used in smart security, smart city and Other scenes.

These processors use the data processing flow pattern of the AttenTIon Engine + CogniTIon Engine to increase the computing speed of the chip by more than 10 times.

Yu Kai also revealed that the horizon will launch the next generation of self-driving journey processor in 2018.

In October 2017, Horizon Robots completed nearly $100 million in A+ round financing. This round of financing was led by Intel Capital, and Harvest Investment Co., Ltd., other investors including current shareholders Chenxing Capital, Gaochun Capital, Shuanghu Investment and Linear capital.

Bit continent

According to public information, Bitcoin was founded in 2013 and currently has more than 1,000 employees worldwide, located in Beijing, Taiwan, North America and other regions. The company currently sells billions of chips and has built a tens of billions of computing centers around the world.

In November 2017, Bitcoin announced the company's artificial intelligence brand SOPHON ("Calculation"), and brought the world's first tensor acceleration computing chip BM1680, as well as board SC1/SC1+, intelligent video analysis server SS1 and other products. .

It is reported that BM1680 is a dedicated custom chip for tensor calculation acceleration processing for deep learning applications. It is suitable for inference prediction and training of deep neural networks such as CNN, RNN and DNN.

According to the plan, Bitland will release the second generation of BC chip BM1682 in 2018, and the computing power will be greatly improved. The third and fourth generations will be released in succession. Tang Weiwei said that according to the plan, the new BC AI chip will be launched every nine months or so, and after another one or two generations, Bitland has the confidence to surpass the actual performance of the GPU in deep learning reasoning.

In September 2017, Bitcoin was exposed to raise $50 million from venture capital firms such as IDG Capital and Sequoia Capital to enhance its position among mainstream investors.

According to information from Thinkforce, in 2017, the company was founded by senior experts in chip design, algorithm software, and system development. The company is determined to design a first-class AI algorithm and advanced manufacturing processes to build an artificial intelligence hardware platform. Provide one-stop industrial application solutions.

In December 2017, Thinkforce announced the completion of a 450 million A round of financing from Etu Technology, Yunfeng Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Gaochun Capital.

At the same time, Thinkforce also announced its planned AI chip features: based on the industry's advanced semiconductor process technology, using the self-developed microkernel ManyCore architecture, can achieve AI cloud virtualization scheduling at the chip level. This architecture increases the elastic computing and scheduling of the AI ​​cloud by an order of magnitude, and CPU-like virtualization brings multiple cost savings to the elastic scheduling of cloud computing. At the same time, the technology combined with self-developed firmware and TFDL software SDK can achieve calculation acceleration for various neural network models, which can achieve more than 5 times power consumption and cost savings compared to the Huida mainstream computing card.

Under the dual stimulation of capital and technology, the future of China's AI chip industry will be immeasurable.

2. Defiance of technology to be listed? It is just one of the Ali AI "Unicorn" lineups;

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