British semiconductor agency Graphcore has launched the C600, a PCIe card that provides assist for the 8-bit floating level (FP8) specification.
FP8 goals to supply a common format that accelerates AI growth by optimising reminiscence utilization and works for each AI coaching and inference.
Along with Graphcore, FP8 is supported by trade giants together with NVIDIA, ARM, Intel, and Qualcomm.
The C600 relies on Graphcore’s MK2 IPU and builders as much as 560 TFLOPS of FP8 efficiency and 280 TFLOPS for FP16. It’s a PCIe Gen 4 dual-slot card with a thermal draw energy of 185W.
“We’re making the IPU obtainable on a PCIe card in response to buyer demand in markets the place datacentre configurations, together with rack dimension and energy supply, fluctuate broadly,” wrote Chen Jin, VP and Head of Engineering for Graphcore China, in a blog post.
“This extremely versatile kind issue allows Graphcore prospects to tailor their system setup, together with host server/chassis, to their actual necessities.”
The IPU packs 1,472 processing cores and is able to operating 8,832 unbiased program threads in parallel. Every IPU options 900MB of on-chip SRAM reminiscence that’s situated adjoining to the processing cores.
As much as eight C600 playing cards might be related in a single chassis utilizing high-bandwidth IPU-Hyperlinks.
The US not too long ago elevated the scope of its export restrictions on superior chips to China and it’s not clear whether or not Graphcore needed to adapt the C600 to conform.
Whereas Graphcore is a British firm, the US restrictions apply to corporations in different international locations that use American manufacturing and design instruments for his or her operations.
In response to the export restrictions, NVIDIA stated that it was slowing down its A100 GPU to proceed promoting the {hardware} in China. AMD, in the meantime, has totally halted the gross sales of its MI250 GPU to the nation.
Graphcore says the C600 is accessible now for pre-order in China and Singapore.
(Picture Credit score: Graphcore)
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