CHINA LAUNCHES THE INEVITABLE INDIGENOUS GPU

The Register ^

[FarCenter]

It was absolutely inevitable that China would try to create its own GPU compute engines. It was never a given that it would succeed in only three years.

But with the launch of the BR series of products from Biren Technology, there is finally a credible homegrown GPU controlled by China for graphics and compute, and that is going to add even more competition to the already intense GPU market.

Back in 2019, the trade war between the United States and China was escalating and the Middle Kingdom had long-since been prevented from buying compute engines for its HPC system aspirations. And so Zhang Wen, a serial entrepreneur who, among other things, worked to helped China make better LED chips at a startup created by Zhang Rujing, the founder of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China’s largest chip foundry, decided that China needed its own GPU for computer graphics as well as for numerically intensive high performance computing.

A number of companies have tried, but Wen’s company, presumably named after the Hindi term for “lord of warriors” and not the old English for “at the barn,” has started shipping its BR104 and BR100 GPUs and showed them off at the Hot Chips 34 conference this week.

...

Biren was co-founded with Lingjie Xu, who was a senior GPU architect at Nvidia from 2008 through 2010, then a GPU architect at AMD for two years after that before taking a job as manager of GPU architecture at Samsung for five years after that. Significantly, Xu then became a director at Alibaba Cloud, the cloud division of the Chinese hyperscaler that is one of the Magnificent Seven top IT buyers in the world. (It’s a fair guess who is in the front of the line to buy Biren’s GPUs. . . .) Xu is head of products at Biren, and Wen is chief executive officer.

Wen and Xu hired two important people to get this job done. One was Mike Hong, who was vice president of architecture at GPU maker S3 (bought by Via Technology in 2013) from 2007 through 2016 and chief GPU architect at the HiSilicon chip development spinoff of Huawei Technologies. Wen hired Hong to be chief technology officer at Biren in January 2020. And a year ago, Wen tapped Allen Lee, who used to run AMD’s R&D center in Shanghai as well as running its business with China. With the successful launch of the BR104 and BR100 GPUs, it is no wonder that Biren has a market valuation approaching $3 billion, and there will probably be tremendous pressure for clouds, hyperscalers, enterprises, and IT manufacturers in China to buy its GPUs.

[Dr. Sivana]

This will put pressure on nVidia and AMD to lower prices.

[Sparticus]

How much of this “indigenous” tech was pilfered? Probably nearly all of it.

[StormEye]

"Biren was co-founded with Lingjie Xu, who was a senior
GPU architect at Nvidia from 2008 through 2010,
then a GPU architect at AMD for two years after
that before taking a job as manager of GPU architecture
at Samsung for five years after that."

Yep, the brought it all to Chi-Comms.

[Bobalu]

They get to look over well made cards and then design a copy that works.

Not exactly innovation.

4090Ti is the next card I will buy...when it’s avail..
if the miners don’t buy them all up...
(I’ll need an 800w pwr supp too)

My current NVIDIA GPU is not very special

[TwelveOfTwenty]

How much of this “indigenous” tech was pilfered? Probably nearly all of it.

Thanks to the free traitors if so.

[FarCenter]

Albert Yu

Dr. Yu was born in Shanghai, China in 1941 and raised there and in Taiwan by parents Marina (Chan) and I.T. Yu. He emigrated to California to attend CalTech (1963), and afterwards, Stanford University where he received a PhD in Electrical Engineering (1967). Dr. Yu began his high-tech career at Fairchild Semiconductor and was subsequently recruited by Intel Corporation. He ultimately became Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Microprocessor Products Group - the heart of the company’s business. Dr. Yu was responsible for the design and architecture of over one billion chips, including the 386, 486 and Pentium processors.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/albert-yu-obituary

To design cutting edge ICs, you need Asians on your team.

[Steely Tom]

How much of this “indigenous” tech was pilfered? Probably nearly all of it.

100%. Chinese R&D consists of just one thing: stealing our R&D.

[ckilmer]

the rap is not on asians.

taiwan does just fine inventing its computer chips. So does south korea.

the rap is on CPC sponsored IP thievery. The world would work perfectly fine together if the CPC eliminated a couple of departments that give them a bad name.

[jimmygrace]

Somehow I doubt that they are targeting the video game market. I think they want better facial recognition and street monitoring capabilities.