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Graphcore

Coordinates:51°27′19.0″N2°35′33.3″W/ 51.455278°N 2.592583°W/51.455278; -2.592583
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Graphcore Limited
Company typePrivate
IndustrySemiconductors
Founded2016;8 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
494 (2023)[1]
Websitewww.graphcore.ai

Graphcore Limitedis a Britishsemiconductorcompany that developsaccelerators for AIandmachine learning.It has introduced a massively parallelIntelligence Processing Unit(IPU) that holds the complete machine learning model inside the processor.[2]

History[edit]

Graphcore was founded in 2016 by Simon Knowles and Nigel Toon.[3]

In the autumn of 2016, Graphcore secured a first funding round led byRobert BoschVenture Capital. Other backers includedSamsung,Amadeus Capital Partners,C4 Ventures,Draper Esprit,Foundation Capital,andPitango.[4][5]

In July 2017, Graphcore secured a round B funding led byAtomico,[6]which was followed a few months later by $50 million in funding fromSequoia Capital.[7]

In December 2018, Graphcore closed its series D with $200 million raised at a $1.7 billion valuation, making the company aunicorn.Investors included Microsoft, Samsung and Dell Technologies.[8]

On 13 November 2019, Graphcore announced that their Graphcore C2 IPUs were available for preview onMicrosoft Azure.[9]

Meta Platformsacquired the AI networking technology team from Graphcore in early 2023.[10]

In July 2024,Softbank Groupagreed to acquire Graphcore for around $500 million. The deal is under review by theUK's Business Department'sinvestment security unit.[11][12]

Products[edit]

In 2016, Graphcore announced the world's first graph tool chain designed for machine intelligence called Poplar Software Stack.[13][14][15]

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.[16][17]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 asTensorFlow.[16]The device relies onscratchpad memoryfor its performance rather than traditional cache hierarchies.[18]

In July 2020, Graphcore presented its second generation processor called GC200, built withTSMC's7nm 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.[19]In 2022, Graphcore and TSMC presented theBow 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.[20]Graphcore aims at aGood machine,named afterI.J. Good,enablingAI modelswith more parameters than the human brain has synapses.[20]

Release date Product Process node Cores Threads Transistors teraFLOPS(FP16)
July 2017 Colossus™ MK1 - GC2 IPU 16 nm TSMC 1216 7296 ? ~100-125[21]
July 2020 Colossus™ MK2 - GC200 IPU 7 nm TSMC 1472 8832 59 billion ~250-280[22]
Colossus™ MK3 ~500[23]

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 intoislands(4 tiles per island),[24]that are arranged into columns, and latency is best within tile.[clarification needed][citation needed]The IPU uses IEEEFP16,with stochastic rounding, and alsosingle-precision FP32,at lower performance.[25]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. hasPyTorchsupport.[citation needed]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^abcCherney, Max A. (5 October 2023)."Losses widen, cash needed at chip startup Graphcore, an Nvidia rival, filing shows".Reuters.
  2. ^Peter Clarke (2016-11-01)."AI Chip Startup Shares Insights:" Very large "FinFET chip in the works at TSMC".eetimes.Retrieved2017-08-02.
  3. ^Jolly, Jasper (2020-12-29)."UK chipmaker Graphcore valued at $2.8bn after it raises $222m".The Guardian.
  4. ^Arjun Kharpal (2016-10-31)."AI chipmaker Graphcore raises $30 million to take on Intel".CNBC.Retrieved2017-07-31.
  5. ^Madhumita Murgia (2016-10-31)."UK chip start-up Graphcore raises £30m for take on AI giants".Financial Times.Retrieved2017-08-02.
  6. ^Jeremy Kahn and Ian King (2017-07-20)."U.K. Chip Designer Graphcore Gets $30 Million to Fund Expansion".Bloomberg.Retrieved2017-07-31.
  7. ^Lynley, Matthew (2017-11-12)."Graphcore raises $50M amid a flurry of AI chip activity".TechCrunch.Retrieved2017-12-07.
  8. ^"AI chip startup Graphcore closes $200M Series D, adds BMW and Microsoft as strategic investors".TechCrunch.18 December 2018.Retrieved2018-12-19.
  9. ^Toon, Nigel."Microsoft and Graphcore collaborate to accelerate Artificial Intelligence".graphcore.ai.Retrieved2019-11-16.
  10. ^Paul, Katie (5 May 2023)."Meta Platforms scoops up AI networking chip team from Graphcore".Reuters.
  11. ^Nicol-Schwarz, Kai (9 July 2024)."Graphcore employees have share value wiped as sale to SoftBank agreed".Sifted.
  12. ^Titcomb, James; Field, Matthew (1 July 2024)."Japanese deal for AI champion Graphcore faces national security review".The Daily Telegraph.
  13. ^Fyles, Matt."Inside an AI 'brain' - What does machine learning look like?".graphcore.ai.Retrieved2019-11-16.
  14. ^Doherty, Sally."Introducing Poplar® - our IPU-Processor software at NeurIPS".graphcore.ai.Retrieved2019-11-16.
  15. ^Fyles, Matt."Graph computing for machine intelligence with Poplar™".graphcore.ai.Retrieved2019-11-16.
  16. ^abTrader, Tiffany (2017-07-20)."Graphcore Readies Launch of 16nm Colossus-IPU Chip".hpcwire.HPC Wire.Retrieved2017-12-11.
  17. ^Lucchesi, Ray (2018-11-19)."New GraphCore GC2 chips with 2PFlop performance in a Dell Server".silvertonconsulting.Silverton Consulting.Retrieved2018-12-16.
  18. ^CitadelHigh Performance Computing R&D Team (2019)."Dissecting the Graphcore IPU Architecture via Microbenchmarking"(PDF).
  19. ^"Graphcore Introducing 2nd Generation IPU Systems For AI At Scale".Retrieved2020-08-09.
  20. ^abTimothy Prickett Morgan:GraphCore Goes Full 3D With AI Chips.The Next Platform, March 3, 2022.
  21. ^Kennedy, Patrick (2019-06-07)."Hands-on With a Graphcore C2 IPU PCIe Card at Dell Tech World".ServeTheHome.Retrieved2023-06-26.
  22. ^Ltd, Graphcore."IPU Processors".graphcore.ai.Retrieved2023-06-26.
  23. ^"ScalAH22: 13th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Systems".csm.ornl.gov.Retrieved2023-06-26.
  24. ^Jia, Zhe; Tillman, Blake; Maggioni, Marco; Daniele Paolo Scarpazza (2019). "Dissecting theGraphcore IPUArchitecturevia Microbenchmarking".arXiv:1912.03413[cs.DC].
  25. ^"THE GRAPHCORE SECOND GENERATION IPU"(PDF).

External links[edit]

51°27′19.0″N2°35′33.3″W/ 51.455278°N 2.592583°W/51.455278; -2.592583

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