Cambricon Technologies, established by the two brothers Chen Yunyi and Chen Tianshi of the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAA), announced that it has completed a US$100 million Series A round of financing, from SDIC Ventures (A round led castings), Alibaba.com Venture Capital, Lenovo Ventures, National Science Investment, Zhongke Turing, Yuanyu Origin (Angel Wheel Collar Investment), Yongxun Investment (Angel Wheel Investor) jointly invested.
China is making artificial intelligence chips to narrow the gap with global technology giants.
Artificial Intelligence "Cambrian"
The era of about 600 million years ago was geologically referred to as the "Cambrian Period." A large number of invertebrates emerged in a short period of time as "life bursts." The world's first artificial intelligence processor, which was developed by the Chen Yunkai and Chen Tianshi Institutes of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was named Cambrian. It also means that artificial intelligence is about to usher in an era of big explosions.
This round of funding resulted in the Cambrian valuation reaching 1 billion U.S. dollars.
According to the introduction on the website of the Cambrian, the 1A chip released by the company last year is the world's first commercially available "deep learning" "neural network" processor chip for smart phones, security surveillance, drones, wearable devices, and Intelligent driving and other types of terminal equipment, when running the mainstream intelligent algorithm performance and power ratio than the traditional processor.
Cambrian Technology CEO Chen Tianshi explained: “There are so many deep learning applications, but all are based on traditional general-purpose processors such as CPUs or GPUs. For example, an old story a few years ago was that Google spent tens of thousands of CPUs. Training cat face recognition model. The future neural network that wants to expand to human brain scale, whether CPU or GPU, is not enough to support."
He said that based on historical experience, we need a special type of intelligent processor chip in the smart era. Chen Tianshi said: “Cambrian is a processor designed specifically for deep learning of artificial intelligence. Its performance in image and speech recognition is at least two orders of magnitude higher than that of traditional processors, and its integration is several times that of conventional processors. It is possible to carry artificial intelligence chips on other mobile devices."
For the difference between universal chips and professional chips, Chen Yunfu likes to use the "Swiss Army Knife" and "Kitchen Knife" as a metaphor. He believes that an ordinary processor is like a "Swiss Army Knife." Although it is universal, it is unprofessional and causes waste. However, when cooking, it is also handy for kitchen knives. Professional deep learning processors are more efficient and faster. "kitchen knife".
Chen Yunji, chief scientist of the Institute of Computing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the chief scientist of the Cambrian Company's co-founder, said that the Cambrian 1A chip can solve two problems: First, it significantly improves the computational efficiency of computer systems in the field of artificial intelligence and can exceed the traditional central processing. The device and the graphics processor chip are two orders of magnitude; second, the offline intelligentization of the terminal product allows many user data not to be uploaded, thereby ensuring information security.
Current Cambrian terminal processor IP products have been derived from multiple models such as 1A and 1H. According to Chen Tianshi, the Cambrian A round of financing will be used to promote the product and marketization of the Cambrian series processor in the terminal and the cloud. To promote the intelligentization of various types of terminal equipment and provide high-performance and low-power cloud intelligent processing solutions.
The Cambrian is pushing chips to the market in full swing. According to Chen Tianshi, commercialization mainly involves two aspects: one is the terminal and the other is the cloud. The terminal products are mobile phones, smart glasses, bracelets, and so on, and require chips to identify images, video, and text. In the cloud, well-known cloud clients such as HKUST and Shuguang are already customers of the Cambrian.
How far is the Chinese chip from leading the world?
The average age of members of the Cambrian team is only 25 years old, and many key members have started working in related fields during their school years. Faced with the news that Chinese artificial intelligence chips lead the world, people in the industry hold different views. A researcher from the HKUST told the First Financial reporter: “The Cambrian project relied on the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the starting point was very high. Moreover, the institute had bred a company like Lenovo and was a leading company in the Chinese artificial intelligence hardware industry. normal."
The Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is China's first national academic institution that specializes in the comprehensive research of computer science and technology and is hailed as "the cradle of China's computer industry." Earlier, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully developed China's first general-purpose central processor chip "Godson One." Although "London One" was criticized by some people in the industry, it still made important contributions to the development of Chinese chips. "You certainly can't ask it to compete with Intel, but it is still applied in some areas." The above-mentioned China University of Science and Technology researchers told the First Financial reporter.
Sheng Linghai, a research vice president at Gartner and a chip industry analyst, told the First Financial reporter: “According to the country's new generation of artificial intelligence development strategy, artificial intelligence chips are used in security, military, and video artificial intelligence algorithms. It's just a need. Don't worry about orders. As long as the technology is perfect, it can replace Jetson's artificial intelligence development board Jetson."
However, a professional from Nvidia told the First Financial reporter: “The Cambrian and Nvidia’s chips are not very comparable, because it is an integrated circuit (ASIC) designed for special purpose, just like Google’s TPU chip. Designed for Tensor-flow, there will be limitations. And Nvidia's GPU has greater scalability, can be programmed according to different application needs, optimized for different algorithms, and can stand the test of technological upgrades, etc."
"The smart age is coming sooner or later." Chen Yunxi said, "Each era has its core material carriers, such as the steam engine in the industrial era and the general-purpose CPU in the information era. This core carrier will also appear in the smart era."
According to Tractica, a consulting firm, forecasting data show that by 2025, the market income for AI-related deep learning chipsets will soar to US$12.2 billion from US$500 million last year, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 40%.
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