Over a dozen of new GPU developers emerged in China in recent years, and this month yet another GPU designer — MetaX — introduced its first product — the Xisi N100 — that is designed for artificial intelligence and video processing applications. What is perhaps more interesting is that the company vows to introduce its first gaming graphics processor by 2025, reports IT Home.
For now, MetaX is focused primarily on AI and data center GPUs, perhaps because they are more lucrative and require more predictable software efforts. But Yang Jian, a co-founder of the company, says that the company plans to introduce GPUs for gaming by 2025. The company's website indeed indicates that the company is prepping MXG-series GPUs for graphics rendering, though it is said that they are designed for cloud gaming and data center applications, so for now it is not completely clear whether the company's GPUs will actually be used by client PCs.
While it remains to be seen whether MetaX can produce a competitive gaming GPU, its Xisi N100 (MXN series) for inference and video processing looks quite promising. The single-slot low-profile card with the N100 chip and HBM2E memory onboard features compute performance of 160 INT8 TOPS and 80 FP16 TFLOPS. To put the numbers into context, Nvidia's entry-level A30 compute GPU features 330 INT8 TOPS and 165 FP16 TFLOPS (two times higher with sparsity). Assuming that MetaX's self-developed MXMACA software stack works fine and the compute GPU can indeed hit its peak performance, it looks rather capable.
As far as the video capabilities of the MetaX N100 are concerned, the GPU supports AV1, AVS2, H.265, and H.265/HEVC formats and resolutions of up to 8K. The developer claims that it can encode up to 128 streams and decode up to 96 streams, though MetaX does not disclose what resolutions it is talking about here.
For some reason, MetaX does not disclose what process technology it uses to make its Xisi N100 and where, but given the fact that it uses advanced packaging with HBM2E, we suspect that the compute processor is made by a leading foundry using an advanced fabrication process.
