Chinese Moore Threads Unveils Chunxiao GPU: 4,096 SPs, GDDR6, PCIe Gen 5

Moore Threads Intelligent Technology, a major graphics processors developer from China, on Thursday announced its next generation GPU that can be used for gaming, artificial intelligence, and datacenter workloads. The MTT S80 gaming graphics cards as well as MTT S3000 server board promise to deliver compute performance akin to that of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, though their actual performance in games and professional applications is something that remains to be tested. 

The Chunxiao GPU

Moore Threads's new graphics processor is based around the company's Chunxiao architecture that supports FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision and is compatible with the company's MUSA computing platform and application programming interface (it can work with standard APIs too though). The MTT Chunxiao GPU is clocked at 1.80 GHz – 1.90 GHz and packs 4,096 stream processors, 128 tensor cores, 256 texture units, and 256 render output. The GPU features a 256-bit memory interface and can work with GDDR6 memory with a 14 GT/s data transfer rate. As for host bus, it features 16 PCIe Gen5 lanes and fully supports the SR-IOV specification for PCIe virtualization in server environments. The GPU up to 32-way partitioning, which will be handy for Android games rendering.  

The chip also comes with a rather powerful video engine that supports AV1, H.264, and H.265 codecs for up to 8K videos as well as can decode up to 32 streams at a 1080p30 resolution. As for output, the GPU has four display engines supporting an up to 8Kp30 resolution and has three DisplayPort 1.4 as well as one HDMI 2.1 interface. 

Moore Threads says that depending on clocks, its Chunxiao GPU can deliver 14.4 FP32 TFLOPS or 15.2 FP32 TFLOPS, which is comparable to single precision compute performance of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU. On paper, this is enough to make it to our list of the best gaming graphics cards available today, but how the ChunxiaoGPU works in real life is something that we will have to test. 

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Meanwhile, since the Moore Threads Chunxiao graphics processor is aimed at AI, gaming and datacenter workloads, it comprises of 22 billion of transistors, which is fairly complex. To put the number into context, Nvidia's GA104 features 17.4 billion transistors, whereas AMD's Navi 21 packs 26.8 billion of transistors. Moore Threads does not disclose which process technology it uses to make its Chunxiao graphics processor.

Two Products Coming 

For now, Moore Threads plans to offer two products based on the Chunxiao GPU — the MTT S80 graphics card with a 14.4 FP32 TFLOPS throughput and 16GB of memory as well as the MTT S3000 server card with a 15.2 FP32 TFLOPS compute performance and 32GB of memory. 

Moore Threads has not disclosed power consumption of its MTT S80 and MTT S3000 products, though the former comes with a rather sophisticated cooling system with three fans. 

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One of the main advantages that the Moore Threads Chunxiao offers is its broad compatibility; It can work with a variety of client and datacenter hardware platforms (Arm, Ampere, Intel, etc.) and operating systems. It is compatible with Microsoft's DirectX (and therefore will ship with appropriate drivers for Windows), Khronos Group's OpenGL/OpenGL ES, proprietary MUSA as well as multiple specialized APIs. Furthermore, the Chunxiao can work with PyTorch, TensorFlow, PaddlePaddle, Jittor and other mainstream deep learning frameworks and popular AI models. 

To ensure compatibility with modern games, Moore Threads says it had worked closely with developers of Unreal Engine and Unity as well as creators of popular titles (e.g., Call of Duty, Crossfire, Counter Strike, Diablo 3, League of Legends, etc.). Meanwhile, Moore Threads admits that for now its Chunxiao only properly supports about 20 DirectX titles and does not make any promises about performance. 

The GPU developer plans to start selling its MTT S80 graphics cards at JD.com on November 11, 2022.  No pricing has been announced.