6.6 China’s AI Chips Are Poised to Take the Lead
In April 2017, CAS set aside 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million) to
develop a brain-inspired processor chip specialized for deep learning.
Called Cambricon, the chip was the world’s first processor that could
simulate human nerve cells and synapses to conduct deep learning.
Cambricon was named after the Cambrian explosion, a sudden flowering
of a great diversity of new life forms that began roughly 540 million
years ago. The Cambricon research project was helmed by brothers Chen
Yunji and Chen Tianshi, who were two of the youngest full professors at
the ICT and whose aspiration was to enable machines to better understand
and serve humanity. In 2015, Chen Yunji was selected as one of MIT
Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. Younger brother Chen
Tianshi was Founder and CEO of Cambricon Technologies, a company
set up in March 2016 to bring the Cambricon chips to market.
The two brothers were responsible for the basic research on architectures
and algorithms for the Cambricon system. Unlike existing neural
networks like AlphaGo which require thousands of GPU-based accelerators,
Cambricon processors were designed to operate more efficiently
and run on much less power. According to an announcement made at
the 3rd World Internet Conference held in China in 2016, the
Cambricon-1A chip could handle 16 billion virtual neurons per second
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and had a peak capacity of two trillion synapses per second. This performance
was double that of a conventional GPU (graphic processing
unit) but had a power consumption lower by one order of magnitude.
Huawei’s Kirin 970 chip, which was used to develop its Mate-10 smartphone,
utilized Cambricon’s intellectual property.
Aiming to have one billion smart devices using its AI processor and
capture 30% of China’s high-performance AI chip market within three
years, Cambricon Technologies launched another three AI processor IP
products in November 2017, all of which involved substantial evolvement
of the Cambricon-1A chip. The Cambricon-1H8 focused on
lower power consumption, providing up to 2.3 times performance per
watt over the Cambricon-1A chip. The Cambricon-1H16 had wider
application and better performance. The Cambricon-1M was made for
intelligent driving and had 10 times the performance of Cambricon-1A.
The company said that the three new AI processors could be applied
to image recognition, intelligent driving, security monitoring, unmanned
planes, automatic speech recognition, natural language and other applications.
In May 2018, the company launched high performance machine
learning processor chips Cambricon-MLU100 and Cambricon-
MLU200 for servers and an AI software platform Cambricon NeuWare
for developers.
Chen Yunji and Chen Tianshi (from left to right).
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Cambricon-MLU100 high performance deep learning processor.
Cambricon Technologies is now one of the highest-valued smart
chip startups in the world. Its Series B funding round in June 2018 saw
its valuation soar to US$2.5 billion. Investors reportedly included several
Chinese state-owned companies, government-supported Capital
Investment Group and industry leaders like TCL, Alibaba and Lenovo.
Its previous investors included iFlyTek, Oriza and Yonghua. iFlyTek is
a voice recognition company and part of China’s national AI team,
while Oriza and Yonghu are early-stage investment companies with a
technology focus.
Cambricon’s ambitious target is in line with the Chinese government’s
stated goal of building a 1 trillion yuan (US$152.5 billion)
AI core industry by 2030, supported by domestically designed AI
processors that can rival US companies like Intel, Qualcomm and
Nvidia. The AI semiconductor industry is yet to be matured enough
to form a developed industrial ecosystem around the world. There
are several countries who are eager to lead the industry by establishing
an ecosystem pivoted on their own interests. Statistics showed
that from 2015 to 2017, worldwide investments in AI chips rose
from US$800 million to US$1.6 billion, the number of companies
focused on developing AI chips went from just a few to more than
20, and the latter half of 2017 saw more than 30 different AI chips
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waiting to be mass produced in TSMC’s manufacturing line. With
this development trend, it was estimated that by the year 2025, the
market of AI chip would reach a value of US$12.2 billion on a
compound annual growth rate of 40%.
This is an opportunity for Cambricon and China to pursue a leading
role in the global ecosystem on the same starting line as Nvidia,
Intel, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, all of whom are active in
developing deep learning microchips. China has the world’s largest
market, is a step ahead in its AI chip development, and has an efficient
industrial network of companies in all AI sectors. From both technology
and finance perspectives, the country looks to be a very promising
candidate to lead the international AI ecosystem, and Cambricon will
no doubt be the impetus for China to achieve this dream. ترجم للغة العربية ترجمة متميزة