Graphcore

Graphcore is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It aims to make a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor.[1]

Graphcore Limited
TypePrivate
IndustrySemiconductors
Founded2016 
Headquarters
Bristol
,
United Kingdom
Key people
Nigel Toon (CEO)
Simon Knowles (CTO)
ProductsIPU, Poplar
Websitehttps://www.graphcore.ai/

History

Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon.

In the autumn of 2016, Graphcore secured a first funding round lead by Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Other backers include Samsung, Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, and Pitango Capital.[2][3] In July 2017, Graphcore secured a round B funding lead by Atomico,[4] which was followed a few months later by $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.[5] In December 2018, Graphcore closed its series D with $200 million raised at a $1.7 billion valuation, making the company a unicorn. Investors included Microsoft, Samsung and Dell Technologies.[6] On 13 November 2019 Graphcore announced that their Graphcore C2 IPUs are available for preview on Microsoft Azure.[7]

Products

In 2016, Graphcore announced the world's first graph tool chain designed for machine intelligence called Poplar Software Stack.[8][9][10]

In July 2017, Graphcore announced their first chip, called the Colossus GC2, a "16 nm massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor", first available in 2018.[11][12] Packaged with two chips on a single PCI Express card called the Graphcore C2 IPU, it is stated to perform the same role as a GPU in conjunction with standard machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow.[11] The device relies on scratchpad memory for its performance rather than traditional cache hierarchies.[13]

In July 2020, Graphcore presented hardware using a second generation processor called GC200 built in TSMC's 7nm FinFET manufacturing process. GC200 is a 59 billion transistor, 823 square millimeter integrated circuit with 1,472 computational cores and 900 Mbyte of local memories.[14]

See also

References
  1. Peter Clarke (2016-11-01). "AI Chip Startup Shares Insights: "Very large" FinFET chip in the works at TSMC". eetimes. Retrieved 2017-08-02.
  2. Arjun Kharpal (2016-10-31). "AI chipmaker Graphcore raises $30 million to take on Intel". CNBC. Retrieved 2017-07-31.
  3. Madhumita Murgia (2016-10-31). "UK chip start-up Graphcore raises £30m for take on AI giants". Financial Times. Retrieved 2017-08-02.
  4. Jeremy Kahn and Ian King (2017-07-20). "U.K. Chip Designer Graphcore Gets $30 Million to Fund Expansion". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2017-07-31.
  5. Lynley, Matthew (2017-11-12). "Graphcore raises $50M amid a flurry of AI chip activity". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2017-12-07.
  6. "AI chip startup Graphcore closes $200M Series D, adds BMW and Microsoft as strategic investors". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-12-19.
  7. Toon, Nigel. "Microsoft and Graphcore collaborate to accelerate Artificial Intelligence". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  8. Fyles, Matt. "Inside an AI 'brain' - What does machine learning look like?". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  9. Doherty, Sally. "Introducing Poplar® - our IPU-Processor software at NeurIPS". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  10. Fyles, Matt. "Graph computing for machine intelligence with Poplar™". www.graphcore.ai. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  11. Trader, Tiffany (2017-07-20). "Graphcore Readies Launch of 16nm Colossus-IPU Chip". hpcwire.com. HPC Wire. Retrieved 2017-12-11.
  12. Lucchesi, Ray (2018-11-19). "New GraphCore GC2 chips with 2PFlop performance in a Dell Server". silvertonconsulting.com. Silverton Consulting. Retrieved 2018-12-16.
  13. Citadel High Performance Computing R&D Team (2019). "Dissecting the Graphcore IPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking" (PDF).
  14. "Graphcore Introducing 2nd Generation IPU Systems For AI At Scale". Retrieved 2020-08-09.

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