Biren Emerges from Stealth with GPGPU Offering
By Sally Ward-Foxton 08.26.2022
At Hot Chips, Chinese startup Biren has emerged from stealth, detailing a large, general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) chip intended for AI training and inference in the data center. The BR100 is composed of two identical compute chiplets, built on TSMC 7 nm at 537 mm2 each, plus four stacks of HBM2e in a CoWoS package.
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The BR100 can achieve 2 POPS of INT8 performance, 1 PFLOPS of BF16, or 256 TFLOPS of FP32. This is doubled to 512 TFLOPS of 32-bit performance when using Biren’s new TF32+ number format. The GPU also supports other 16- and 32-bit formats but not 64-bit (64-bit is not widely used for AI workloads outside of scientific computing).
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As well as its GPU architecture, Biren has also developed a dedicated 412-GB/s chip-to-chip (BR100 to BR100) interconnect called BLink, with eight BLink ports per chip. This is used to connect to other BR100s in a server node.
There is a saying in China: you cannot kill a man by forcing him to hold in his urine. Looks like China will commence to piss all over the competition in the near future.