Shanghai Tianshu Zhixin Semiconductor Co., Ltd., commonly known as Tianshu Zhixin, announced that its Big Island (BI) GPGPU has come to life. The BI is touted as China's first domestic GPGPU that's tailored towards AI and HPC applications and other industries, such as education, medicine, and security.
The BI packs 24 billion transistors, and it's based on a home-made GPU architecture. The chip is built with the cutting-edge 7nm process node and 2.5D CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate) packaging. Tianshu Zhixin doesn't explicitly reveal the foundry that's responsible for producing the BI. However, the description of the node coincides with one of TSMC's manufacturing processes.
Tianshu Zhixin commmenced development on its BI chip in 2018. The company finalized the tapeout for BI back in May 2020 and should have already underwent mass production if Tianshu Zhixin wants to meets its goal of commercializing the chip this year.
The BI solution reportedly provides twice the performance of existing mainstream products on the market, while also offering a very appealing performance-to-cost ratio. BI supports a plethora of floating point formats, including FP32, FP16, BF16, INT32, INT16, and INT8, just to mention a few.
Tianshu Zhixin is keeping a tight lip on the BI's performance, but the company has teased FP16 performance up to 147 TFLOPS. For comparison, the Nvidia A100 and AMD Instinct MI100 deliver FP16 performance figures up to 77.97 TFLOPS and 184.6 TFLOPS, respectively. Note however that Nvidia's A100 also has Tensor cores that can do 312 FP16 TFLOPS (624 TFLOPS with sparsity).
