Company:Graphcore

From HandWiki
Graphcore Limited
TypePrivate
IndustrySemiconductors
Founded2016; 9 years ago (2016)
Founders
  • Nigel Toon
  • Simon Knowles
Headquarters
Bristol
,
United Kingdom
Key people
  • Nigel Toon (CEO)
  • Simon Knowles (CTO)
ProductsIPU, Poplar
RevenueUS$2.7 million (2022)[1]
US$−205 million (2022)[1]
Number of employees
450 (2024)[2]
Websitegraphcore.ai

Graphcore Limited is a British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning. It has introduced a massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor.[3]

History

Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon.[4]

In the autumn of 2016, Graphcore secured a first funding round led by Robert Bosch Venture Capital. Other backers included Samsung, Amadeus Capital Partners, C4 Ventures, Draper Esprit, Foundation Capital, and Pitango.[5][6]

In July 2017, Graphcore secured a round B funding led by Atomico,[7] which was followed a few months later by $50 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.[8]

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.[9]

On 13 November 2019, Graphcore announced that their Graphcore C2 IPUs were available for preview on Microsoft Azure.[10]

Meta Platforms acquired the AI networking technology team from Graphcore in early 2023.[11]

In July 2024, Softbank Group agreed to acquire Graphcore for around $500 million. The deal is under review by the UK's Business Department's investment security unit.[12][13]

Products

In 2016, Graphcore announced the world's first graph tool chain designed for machine intelligence called Poplar Software Stack.[14][15][16]

In July 2017, Graphcore announced its first chip, called the Colossus GC2, a "16 nm massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor", that became available in 2018.[17][18] Packaged with two chips on a single PCI Express card, called the Graphcore C2 IPU (an Intelligence Processing Unit), it is stated to perform the same role as a GPU in conjunction with standard machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow.[17] The device relies on scratchpad memory for its performance rather than traditional cache hierarchies.[19]

In July 2020, Graphcore presented its second generation processor called GC200, built with 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 memory.[20] In 2022, Graphcore and TSMC presented the Bow IPU, a 3D package of a GC200 die bonded face to face to a power-delivery die that allows for higher clock rate at lower core voltage.[21] Graphcore aims at a Good machine, named after I.J. Good, enabling AI models with more parameters than the human brain has synapses.[21]

Release date Product Process node Cores Threads Transistors teraFLOPS (FP16)
July 2017 Colossus™ MK1 - GC2 IPU 16 nm TSMC 1216 7296 ? ~100-125[22]
July 2020 Colossus™ MK2 - GC200 IPU 7 nm TSMC 1472 8832 59 billion ~250-280[23]
Colossus™ MK3 ~500[24]

Both the older and newer chips can use 6 threads per tile[clarification needed] (for a total of 7,296 and 8,832 threads, respectively) "MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) parallelism and has distributed, local memory as its only form of memory on the device" (except for registers).[citation needed] The older GC2 chip has 256 KiB per tile while the newer GC200 chip has about 630 KiB per tile that are arranged into islands (4 tiles per island),[25] that are arranged into columns, and latency is best within tile.[clarification needed][citation needed] The IPU uses IEEE FP16, with stochastic rounding, and also single-precision FP32, at lower performance.[26] Code and data executed locally must fit in a tile, but with message-passing, all on-chip or off-chip memory can be used, and software for AI makes it transparently possible,[clarification needed] e.g. has PyTorch support.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Cherney, Max A. (5 October 2023). "Losses widen, cash needed at chip startup Graphcore, an Nvidia rival, filing shows". Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/losses-widen-cash-needed-chip-startup-graphcore-an-nvidia-rival-filing-2023-10-05/. 
  2. ↑ Sun, Yazhou (7 November 2024). "Chip Designer Graphcore Boosts Staff 20% After SoftBank Purchase". Bloomberg News. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-07/chip-designer-graphcore-is-boosting-staff-20-after-softbank-purchase. 
  3. ↑ Peter Clarke (2016-11-01). "AI Chip Startup Shares Insights: "Very large" FinFET chip in the works at TSMC". eetimes. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1330739. 
  4. ↑ Jolly, Jasper (2020-12-29). "UK chipmaker Graphcore valued at $2.8bn after it raises $222m". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/dec/29/uk-graphcore-valued-28bn-nvidia-artificial-intelligence. 
  5. ↑ Arjun Kharpal (2016-10-31). "AI chipmaker Graphcore raises $30 million to take on Intel". CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/31/ai-chipmaker-graphcore-raises-30-million-to-take-on-intel-nvidia.html. 
  6. ↑ Madhumita Murgia (2016-10-31). "UK chip start-up Graphcore raises £30m for take on AI giants". Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/053f9dea-9e98-11e6-891e-abe238dee8e2. 
  7. ↑ Jeremy Kahn and Ian King (2017-07-20). "U.K. Chip Designer Graphcore Gets $30 Million to Fund Expansion". Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/u-k-chip-designer-graphcore-gets-30-million-to-fund-expansion. 
  8. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (2017-11-12). "Graphcore raises $50M amid a flurry of AI chip activity" (in en). TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/12/graphcore-raises-50m-amid-a-flurry-of-ai-chip-activity/. 
  9. ↑ "AI chip startup Graphcore closes $200M Series D, adds BMW and Microsoft as strategic investors" (in en-US). 18 December 2018. https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/18/ai-chip-startup-graphcore-closes-200m-series-d-adds-bmw-and-microsoft-as-strategic-investors/. 
  10. ↑ Toon, Nigel. "Microsoft and Graphcore collaborate to accelerate Artificial Intelligence" (in en-gb). https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/microsoft-and-graphcore-collaborate-to-accelerate-artificial-intelligence. 
  11. ↑ Paul, Katie (5 May 2023). "Meta Platforms scoops up AI networking chip team from Graphcore". Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-platforms-scoops-up-ai-networking-chip-team-graphcore-2023-05-05/. 
  12. ↑ Nicol-Schwarz, Kai (9 July 2024). "Graphcore employees have share value wiped as sale to SoftBank agreed". Sifted. https://sifted.eu/articles/graphcore-conditional-sale-agreed-news. 
  13. ↑ Titcomb, James; Field, Matthew (1 July 2024). "Japanese deal for AI champion Graphcore faces national security review". The Daily Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/01/softbank-ai-deal-graphcore-national-security-review/. 
  14. ↑ Fyles, Matt. "Inside an AI 'brain' - What does machine learning look like?" (in en-gb). https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/what-does-machine-learning-look-like. 
  15. ↑ Doherty, Sally. "Introducing Poplar® - our IPU-Processor software at NeurIPS" (in en-gb). https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/introducing_poplar_our_ipu_processor_software_at_neurips. 
  16. ↑ Fyles, Matt. "Graph computing for machine intelligence with Poplar™" (in en-gb). https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/graph-computing-for-machine-intelligence-with-poplar. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Trader, Tiffany (2017-07-20). "Graphcore Readies Launch of 16nm Colossus-IPU Chip". HPC Wire. https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/07/20/graphcore-readies-launch-16nm-colossus-ipu-chip/. 
  18. ↑ Lucchesi, Ray (2018-11-19). "New GraphCore GC2 chips with 2PFlop performance in a Dell Server". Silverton Consulting. https://silvertonconsulting.com/blog/2018/11/19/new-graphcore-gc2-chips-with-2pflop-performance-in-a-dell-server/. 
  19. ↑ Citadel High Performance Computing R&D Team (2019). "Dissecting the Graphcore IPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking". https://www.graphcore.ai/hubfs/assets/pdf/Citadel%20Securities%20Technical%20Report%20-%20Dissecting%20the%20Graphcore%20IPU%20Architecture%20via%20Microbenchmarking%20Dec%202019.pdf. 
  20. ↑ "Graphcore Introducing 2nd Generation IPU Systems For AI At Scale" (in en-gb). https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/introducing-second-generation-ipu-systems-for-ai-at-scale/. 
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Timothy Prickett Morgan: GraphCore Goes Full 3D With AI Chips. The Next Platform, March 3, 2022.
  22. ↑ Kennedy, Patrick (2019-06-07). "Hands-on With a Graphcore C2 IPU PCIe Card at Dell Tech World" (in en-US). https://www.servethehome.com/hands-on-with-a-graphcore-c2-ipu-pcie-card-at-dell-tech-world/. 
  23. ↑ Ltd, Graphcore. "IPU Processors" (in en). https://www.graphcore.ai/products/ipu. 
  24. ↑ "ScalAH22: 13th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Systems". https://www.csm.ornl.gov/srt/conferences/Scala/2022/. 
  25. ↑ Jia, Zhe; Tillman, Blake; Maggioni, Marco; Daniele Paolo Scarpazza (2019). "Dissecting theGraphcore IPUArchitecturevia Microbenchmarking". arXiv:1912.03413 [cs.DC].
  26. ↑ "THE GRAPHCORE SECOND GENERATION IPU". https://www.graphcore.ai/hubfs/MK2-%20The%20Graphcore%202nd%20Generation%20IPU%20Final%20v7.14.2020.pdf?hsLang=en. 

[ ⚑ ] 51°27′19.0″N 2°35′33.3″W / 51.45528°N 2.592583°W / 51.45528; -2.592583



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Company:Graphcore&oldid=4027060"