After months of searching for a buyer, troubled UK-based artificial intelligence processor designer Graphcore said on Friday that it had been bought by SoftBank. The company will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank and possibly partner with Arm, but what remains to be seen is what will happen to Graphcore’s unique intelligent processing unit (IPU) architecture.
Graphcore will keep its name as it becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank, which paid either $400 million (according to EE Times) or $500 million (according to the BBC) for the company. Over its lifetime, Graphcore has received a total of $700 million in investment from Microsoft and Sequoia Capital, and at its peak in late 2020, it was valued at $2.8 billion. Nigel Toon will remain at the helm of Graphcore, which will hire new staff in its UK offices and will continue to be headquartered in Bristol, with additional offices in Cambridge, London, Gdansk (Poland) and Hsinchu (China).
“This is a tremendous endorsement of our team and their ability to build truly transformative AI technologies at scale, and a great result for our company,” said Nigel Toon. “The demand for AI computing is huge and continues to grow. Much remains to be done to improve the efficiency, robustness and computing power to unlock the full potential of AI. In SoftBank, we have a partner that can enable the Graphcore team to redefine the landscape for AI technology.”
Although Graphcore says it had won contracts with large high-tech companies and deployed its own IPUs, it could not compete against NVIDIA and other vendors of ready-made AI processors due to insufficient funding. In recent years the company’s problems were so severe that it had to lay off 20% of its staff, bringing the number of employees to around 500. These cuts also saw the closure of offices in Norway, Japan and South Korea , which made it even more difficult to compete against the big players.
Graphcore certainly hopes that with SoftBank’s deep pockets and willingness to invest in AI technologies in general and AI processors in particular, it will finally be able to compete head-to-head with established players like NVIDIA.
When asked if Graphcore will work with SoftBank’s Arm, Nigel Toon said he was looking forward to working with all the companies controlled by his parent, including Arm. Meanwhile, SoftBank itself is reportedly looking forward to building its own AI processor venture called Project Izanagi to compete against NVIDIA, while Arm is said to be developing AI processors that will run in SoftBank-owned data centers. Therefore, it remains to be seen where Graphcore fits.
Right now, the best processor Graphcore has is its Colossus MK2 IPU, which is built using 59.4 billion transistors and packs in 1,472 independent cores with simultaneous multithreading (SMT) capable of handling 8,832 threads. parallel. Instead of using HBM or other types of external memory, the chip integrates 900 MB of SRAM, providing an overall bandwidth of 47.5 TB/s per chip. Additionally, it features 10 IPU connections to scale with other MK2 processors. When it comes to performance, the MK2 C600 delivers 560 TFLOPS of FP8, 280 TFLOPS of FP16 and 70 TFLOPS of FP32 performance at 185 W. To put the numbers into context, NVIDIA’s A100 delivers 312 FP16 TFLOPS without retail, as well as 19.5 FP32 TFLOPS, while NVIDIA’s H100 card offers 3,341 FP8 TFLOPS.
Sources: Graphcore, EE Times, BBC, Reuters
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