Highlight:

  • The firm is all set to launch the world’s first ultra-intelligence AI supercomputer named good computer by 2024.
  • Graphcore’s Bow IPU will deliver 40% better performance and 16% better efficiency than its predecessors.

Graphcore, a British semiconductor firm, has revealed the first Wafer-on-Wafer (WoW) processor, clearing the path for an “ultra-intelligence AI supercomputer.”

The chip named Bow IPU is the first one to be developed on TSMC’s WoW technology.

The WoW technology collates two Wafers together to create a new 3D die:

  • The first wafer is used to process AI, and it’s compatible with the GC200 IPU processor. Moreover, this wafer includes 1,472 independent IPU core tiles, can execute more than 8,800 threads, and has more than 900 MB of in-processor memory.
  • The second wafer is a power delivery die that includes deep trench capacitors to ensure a large performance because it is located next to the processing cores and memory.

Graphcore affirmed that its Bow IPU chip delivers 40% higher performance and 16% better power efficiency for real-world applications when compared to previous versions or models.

Furthermore, the British semiconductor firm stated that its Bow Pod flagship products could deliver more than 89 petaFLOPS of AI computing. Additionally, the superscale Bow Pod can scale up to 350 petaFLOPS.

Graphcore’s plan to develop an ultra-intelligence AI supercomputer is one of the fascinating announcements in the tech world.

Graphcore emphasized how “approximately 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion parameters in a biological-neural-network system that delivers a level of computing yet to be matched by any silicon computers.”

It also mentioned that it is developing an AI computer that will exceed the parametric capacity of the brain. The computer’s name is ‘Good,’ which is named after the pioneer of computer science, Jack Good.

The pivotal achievements of Jack Good during the Second World War are worth reading. What’s significant is the fact that Good was the first person to write about a machine that is more powerful than the human brain in 1965 in his paper, ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultra-Intelligent Machine’.

“Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’ and man’s intelligence would be left far behind. Thus, the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.” wrote Good.

Graphcore plans to deliver the first ultra-intelligence AI computer to the world by 2024 and will have the following features:

  • More than 10 exaFlops of AI floating-point compute.
  • Memory up to four petabytes and a bandwidth of more than 10 petabytes/second.
  • Backup for AI model sizes of 500 trillion parameters.
  • 3D wafer on the Wafer logic stack.
  • Entirely supported by Graphcore’s popular SDK.
  • Expected cost: USD 120 million.
  • Graphcore will announce further details and updates over the coming years.

Experts’ view:

“TSMC has worked closely with Graphcore as a leading customer for our breakthrough SoIC-WoW solution as their pioneering designs in cutting-edge parallel processing architectures make them an ideal match for our technology,” said Paul de Bot, GM of TSMC Europe.