After months of searching for a buyer, troubled UK-based AI processor designer Graphcore said on Friday it had been acquired by SoftBank. The company will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and will likely collaborate with Arm, but it remains to be seen what happens to Graphcore's unique architecture of Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs).
Graphcore will keep its name as it becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of SoftBank, which paid $400 million (according to EE Times) or $500 million (according to the BBC) for the company. Over its lifetime, Graphcore has received a total of $700 million in investment from Microsoft and Sequoia Capital, and at its peak in late 2020, it was valued at $2.8 billion. Nigel Toon will remain head of Graphcore, which will hire new staff in its UK offices and will be headquartered in Bristol, with additional offices in Cambridge, London, Gdansk (Poland), and Hsinchu (China).
“This is a great endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, as well as a great result for our company,” said Nigel Toon. “The demand for AI compute is high and continues to grow. Much remains to be done to improve efficiency, flexibility and computational power to unlock the full potential of AI. At SoftBank, we have a partner that is Graphcore. can enable the team to redefine the landscape for AI technology.”
Although Graphcore says it has won contracts with major high-tech companies and deployed its IPUs, it cannot compete against NVIDIA and other prêt-à-porter AI processor vendors due to insufficient funding. could do In recent years, the company's problems were so severe that it had to lay off 20% of its staff, bringing its workforce to around 500. The cuts also led to the closure of offices in Norway, Japan and South Korea, making it even more difficult. Competing with big players.
Graphcore certainly hopes that with SoftBank's deep pockets and willingness to invest in AI technologies in general and AI processors in particular, it will eventually be able to compete with established players like NVIDIA. .
Asked if Graphcore would work with Softbank's Arm, Nigel Toon said he looked forward to working with all companies controlled by its parent, including Arm. Meanwhile, SoftBank itself is reportedly looking forward to building its own AI processor venture called Project Izanagi to compete against NVIDIA, while Arm is reportedly developing AI processors that will operate in SoftBank-owned data centers. . So, it remains to be seen where the graph core fits.
For now, the best processor Graphcore has is its Colossus MK2 IPU, built using 59.4 billion transistors and packed in 1,472 independent cores with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) to handle 8,832 parallel threads. Has the ability. Instead of using HBM or other types of external memory, the chip integrates 900 MB of SRAM, providing a total bandwidth of 47.5 TB/s per chip. Additionally, it includes 10 IPU links to scale with other MK2 processors. When it comes to performance, the MK2 C600 delivers 560 TFLOPS of FP8, 280 TFLOPS of FP16, and 70 TFLOPS of FP32 performance at 185W. To put the numbers into context, NVIDIA's A100 delivers 312 FP16 TFLOPS as well as 19.5 FP32 TFLOPS, while NVIDIA's H100 card offers 3,341 FP8 TFLOPS.
Sources: Graphcore, EE Times, BBC, Reuters