After years of toiling to catch up to US tech, China has developed a chip to go up against Nvidia’s A100 in the race for dominance in the AI realm.
Nvidia’s A100 is one of the most advanced computing processors, helping the AI in everything from self-driving cars to making pharmaceuticals or weapons. But Chinese company Biren’s BR100 is said to be even faster, based on initial tests. This is a major step for China.
In 2021, the country imported more than US$433 billion in chips, exceeding even oil, but the country is making it a priority to swing that around.
To become more self-reliant, Beijing promised more than US$180 billion in state-funding to support the local chip industry – and it appears to be paying off.
Like the A100, the BR100 is a graphics processing chip – GPU. Both are designed to help computers perform complex tasks faster, and to improve performance. Both use the same type of transistor – the fundamental unit that controls the flow of electronic signals, allowing the chips to store data or run calculations.
The base for both transistors is 7nm. But while the Nvidia A100 has 54.2 billion transistors over a plate of 826mm², Biren’s BR100 has 77 billion over 1074mm², helping increase speed.
Biren say their chip can perform 1024 trillion operations per second at its peak – about three times the stated speed of Nvidia’s A100.
Nvidia now say they will produce a rival to the BR100. The race for dominance in the AI realm is entering a new phase, and things will only get more interesting.
