Chinese chiplet-based GPU claims performance record
Startup Biren Technology Co. Ltd. (Shanghai, China) has released its first general-purpose GPU chip claiming it sets a record in ‘single-chip’ performance. Although, its component is, in fact, a fairly large chiplet assembly
The BR100 provides over 1 petaflop of 16bit floating-point performance and over 2 petaops of 8bit fixed point performance. The company claims this is three times the performance of flagship products sold by international manufacturers. Biren did not announce what manufacturing process the chip is implemented in or where it is being manufactured.
Biren was founded in 2019 and in March 2021 it raised more than 4.7 billion yuan (about US$730 million) and claimed ‘unicorn’ status. Biren has also announced its own chip architecture called Bi Liren; Oracle Access Manager (OAM) server modules, OAM server called Haixuan and the Birensupa software platform.
The BR100 is the first general-purpose GPU chip in China to adopt ‘chiplet’ technology, the first to adopt the PCIe 5.0 host interface, and the first to support the CXL interconnect protocol, the company states on its website.
Hong Zhou, CTO of Biren, said that the reason BR100 can outperform other GPGPUs is because of its underlying Bi Liren dataflow architecture and the use of chiplets. The use of chiplets allows for a much bigger chip than allowed for by the size of the IC mask. Also by reducing the area of the each chiplet production capacity and yield are improved reducing the cost of silicon wafers and supporting more flexible product strategies.
At the same time as launching the BR100 Biren has launched the BR104. It is a single chiplet that provides about half the performance of the BR100
“The Chiplet design allows us to obtain two chips at the same time through one tapeout, which greatly speeds up the iteration speed and covers different levels of the market at the same time.” Hong Zhou said.
Biren is led by founder, chairman and CEO Zhang Wen.
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