Chinese computing card in production - performance that competes with AMD and Nvidia

AMD and Nvidia are not alone in developing graphics and computing card circuits and in China are investing heavily in domestic solutions, with the goal of replacing all foreign hardware by 2022. Last year, for example, progress was reported on the processor front with Zhaoxin-signed models taking place in consumer-oriented computers and now more news follows, but with a data center in focus.

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It is the company Shanghai Tianshu Intellectual Semiconductor that unveils a computing card with the code name “Big Island”, which now includes mass production on TSMC’s densely populated process 7 nanometers. Like Nvidia’s and AMD’s high – performance computing cards A100 and Instinct MI100, it is a monolithic circuit that is accompanied by large amounts of HBM2 memory, for a high-performance result on paper.

	Big Island	A100	Instinct MI100
Circuit	Big Island	GA100	Arcturus
Transistors	24 billion	54 billion	50 billion
Manufacturing	TSMC 7 nm	TSMC 7 nm	TSMC 7 nm
Architecture	?	Ampere	CDNA 1
Kernels	?	6 192 st.	7 680 st.
Memory amount	32 GB HBM2	40/ 80 GB HBM2	32 GB HBM2
Memory bandwidth	1.2 TB / s	1.6 TB / s	1.2 TB / s
FP32	37 TFLOPS	19,5 TFLOPS 156 TFLOPS (Tensor) 312 TFLOPS (Sparsity)	23,1 TFLOPS 46,1 TFLOPS (Matrix)
TDP	300 W	400 W	300 W

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The graphics circuit has 24 billion transistors, which is more than halved compared to the Nvidia and AMD alternatives. Despite this, performance in the FP32 context with simple precision is claimed to reach 37 TFLOPS – a real step up from AMD’s 23.1 and Nvidia’s 19.5 TFLOPS. The latter, on the other hand, has more methods for FP32 calculations in the arsenal, where significantly higher capacity is listed.

The memory amount of the “Big Island” card is 32 GB HBM2, which is identical to the Instinct MI100 but lower than the 80 GB that the top model of the A100 is equipped with. In addition, few details about the new Chinese card are known, as neither architecture nor number of cores are listed. It is known, however, that the TDP value lands at 300 watts; once again a match with AMD and lower than Nvidia, which instead has a TDP value of 400 watts.

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Big Islands 6.jpg

Fv “Big Island” as plug-in card, “Big Island” for mounting in server, server equipped with “Big Island” circuits

In connection with the unveiling of the card’s performance, the company shows images that show that the circuit takes place in both PCI Express-connected card format, as well as a form factor intended for mounting directly in servers. It remains to be seen when the strained manufacturing will allow the “Big Islands” to roll out into the server world on a broad front, and whether these will be competitors to the solutions from AMD, Intel and Nvidia outside China as well.

Source: Iluvitar (Chinese) via Wccftech