‘Colossus’ IPU Targets Datacenters, Cloud 

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A second $30 million funding round for U.K. AI chip developer Graphcore sets up the company to go to market with its “intelligent processing unit” (IPU) in 2017 with scale-up production for enterprise datacenters and cloud environments planned in 2018. The company emerged from stealth mode in the fall of 2016 with $30 million in series A funding. Total raised capital now stands at $60 million.

The funding infusion will facilitate the launch of Graphcore’s first chip, codenamed Colossus. The 16nm massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor is expected to ship to early-access customers before the end of 2017 with general availability to follow in early in 2018.

With 1,000 processor units per chip, "it’s designed from the ground up for machine intelligence,” explained Graphcore CTO Simon Knowles. “It’s nothing like a GPU; it’s a very large state-of-the-art 16-nm FinFET chip and we put two of those on a PCI Express card and bolt them together."

Read the full story here at sister web site HPCwire.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).