China's First 7nm GPU Nears Mass Production, Pics Emerge

Shanghai Tianshu Intellectual Semiconductor Co. (Tianshu Zhixin) announced Wednesday that it's nearing "mass production and commercial delivery" of Big Island, China's first domestically produced 7nm general-purpose GPU (GPGPU).

Tianshu Zhixin said in January that BI was made using an unidentified 7nm process node and 2.5D chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging. On Wednesday, it confirmed our suspicion that BI was made using TSMC's 7nm FinFET process.

It also shared a little more information about what people can expect from BI when it starts to ship. The image below shows Tianshu Zhixin's performance claims in a variety of floating point formats that it teased during the January announcement:

Tianshu Zhixin claimed that BI offers "nearly twice the performance of mainstream manufacturers' products" at a lower power consumption while also offering a more attractive price-to-performance ratio. (Pricing details weren't revealed, however.)

The company said that its "progress of product development and commercial application is 1-2 years ahead of domestic counterparts." That's an important lead to claim as China pushes companies to reduce their reliance on foreign products.

Tianshu Zhixin also shared images of the first BI products:

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Exact shipping information and pricing details for the first BI products weren't provided. It wouldn't be a surprise if progress is slower than Tianshu Zhixin would like, thanks to the global chip shortage, but it's clear the company's raring to go.