Last month Huawei released its first artificial intelligence mobile phone Mate 10 much consumer attention.It is reported that this phone is equipped with artificial intelligence chip Kirin 970 one of its core is provided by the Cambrian.
Today, this somewhat mysterious company - Cambrian finally held its first conference in Beijing since its inception, introduced including last year has launched two AI processor IP technology details, as well as the latest three smart processors IP products, along with two next year's artificial intelligence chip.
In addition, the Cambrian CEO Chen Tianshi also announced plans for the future roadmap, including the next 3 years to do that 1 billion terminals, the domestic high-performance smart chip market share of 30% and so on.
Five chip appearances in two years
During the product introductions, Chen Tianshi highlighted five chips in the past two years, including the technical details of two chips introduced in 2016, Cambrian 1A and a test chip.
The debut of the Cambrian 1A Processor IP, launched last year, is based on the world's first artificial intelligence-specific instruction set invented by Cambrian science and technology and has complete independent intellectual property rights. In computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. The key artificial intelligence tasks with outstanding versatility and performance ratio, the theoretical peak performance at 1GHz clock speed of 512 billion times per second semi-precision floating-point operations, sparse neural network equivalent theoretical peak of up to 2 trillion per second Sub-floating-point operations, while supporting eight fixed-point operations and a weight.Find in a number of key artificial intelligence applications, Cambrian 1A reached more than 25 times the performance of traditional quad-core general-purpose CPU and 50 times more energy efficiency.
Chen Tianyu said that although the Cambrian 1A was born in 2016, 1A is still the most complete and the most forward-looking IP chip product on the market today as the year 2017 is about to pass.It integrates the Cambrian 1A Huawei chip Kirin 970 processing In the contest with Apple products, we easily won this battle.
Another processor in 2016 was a principle test chip developed by the Cambrian, said Chen Tianshi, 'The main role was to verify our architecture and facilitate the development of our application software at the time, but this chip was also used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Brother company - the dawn of the Branch, the first time taken away to do a server for artificial intelligence reasoning.This is the world's first integrated Cambrian chip computing products, artificial intelligence inference business, the peak reached 120T '
At today's release, the Cambrian once again launched three new products: the Cambrian 1H8 for low-power scene vision applications, the more versatile and higher performing Cambria 1H16, and the smart driving area Cambrian 1M.
The Cambria 1H8 processor is a processor-specific IP for computer vision. The 1H8 IP offers lower power consumption and lower cost than the first Cambrian 1A processors to be released Applications and computer vision areas, including photo assist, image processing, security monitoring and so has a very wide range of applications.
For the positioning of the 1H8 Cambrian, Chen Tianshi said we hope to provide more affordable and cheaper AI hardware solutions in this area. "Cambria 1H8 offers four optional computing capabilities to set 1T / 2T / 4T / 8T. Believe it The future in the visual market will shine.
The Cambria 1H16 is more high-end than the 1H8 and is primarily used in a wide range of areas related to smart processing such as cell phones, security, cameras, speakers, robots, etc. Three of the biggest features are better performance, lower energy consumption and more functionality However, Chen Tianshi did not disclose specific technical data.He said that only chip partners by signing with us NDA way, you can get more technical details.
The third new product is for the Cambrian area of intelligent driving 1M According to Chen Tianshi introduction, this product is currently being planned, its performance will reach more than 10 times the Cambrian 1A, highly integrated, with higher performance work The goal is to make all of China's cars use Chinese-made smart processors.
Next year push two heavy products, 3 years to achieve 1000000000 terminals 30% of the domestic market
In addition to appealing to several products, Chen Tianshi also revealed two heavyweight next year, as well as the company's small target.
According to him, in the next 18 months, Cambrian will also launch two high-performance commercial smart chips. MLU100 which uses TSMC 16nm process, while supporting reasoning and training, emphasis on reasoning can be applied to the data center, Small and medium-sized server. Then released a more emphasis on training smart chip called MLU200, this chip for enterprise-class smart R & D center.
Chen Tianshi gave great expectation to these two chips. He said that what I had done with previous accumulation of technology is for the preparation of large-scale commercial use of these two cloud smart chips.
In addition, conference, Chen Tianshi also on the development of the Cambrian next three years set two small goals:
First, three years later, Cambrian strive to occupy 30% of China's high-performance smart chip market share.
In the second and third years, we must strive to have more than 1 billion intelligent terminals worldwide use Cambodian end-processor technology.
Chen Tianshi said that if these two goals can be achieved in three years, I believe at that time, the Cambrian has initially supported the new ecology of China-led smart industries.
Cambrian software platform and cloud-based development strategy, a total build AI ecology
Along with the release of the new smart processor, there is the Cambrian NeuWare artificial Cambrian software platform specially developed for the developers by Cambrian companies. It includes three parts of development, debugging and tuning, and will fully support the cloud-side Intelligent processing.
It is understood that the software development platform built on the Cambrian invention of artificial intelligence dedicated instruction set support.This means that based on the Cambrian hardware and software platform, the artificial intelligence industry will build a complete, based on the underlying self-instruction set Smart new ecosystem to facilitate developers to cross-platform application migration, and lay a solid foundation for artificial cloud processing cloud.
Hard and soft wares are already available, and Cambrian will jointly construct a new intelligent ecology together with the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. In addition to the experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, participants from Huawei, Hisilicon, Alibaba Group, Legend Group, , Zhongke Dawning, ARM, Kuangshe technology, horizon and other artificial intelligence industry partners also witnessed the release of the Cambrian new generation of artificial intelligence processor products and road map, and carried out in-depth development of intelligent industry and ecological construction Exchange.
'The success or failure of the chip, in addition to its own efficiency, the ecology is a very crucial aspect. Without the application and software, it is difficult to succeed in the market.' 'Chen Tianshi said that today's conference there are many industry partners The reasons for joining in. 'In the past our domestic enterprises started late, has been an ecological follower in the world, but in the smart era everyone in the same starting line, I think Chinese R & D personnel so smart, dare to be the best in the world, dare to put forward Together to build a new smart ecosystem, it is not enough to have the Cambrian alone, and we all need to work hard together on the hardware instruction set and the software development platform, work hard together in the cloud of the terminal, and work hard in business collaboration.
A round of financing completed this year, has become the world's smart chip Unicorn business field
Cambrian technology company formerly known as CAS Institute of Computing, set up in 2008 to explore the intersection of processor architecture and artificial intelligence 'group of 10 academic team, including Chen Yun 霁 and Professor Chen Tianshi, etc. Task Group as early as 2008 Began to study neural network algorithms and chips, and began publishing research results successively in 2011 and obtained a number of dissertation awards. In 2015, the team successfully developed the world's first deep learning processor chip, Cambrian.
Cambrian Technology was incorporated in Beijing and Shanghai in 2016 and became the most well-known and most intelligent smart chip startup in China in 2016. In the same year, the Cambrian low profile released the world's first commercially available deep learning processor, IP- Cambrian 1A processor .American Cambodian 1A turned out to break a number of records, has been widely concerned by the industry, selected the third World Internet Conference selected fifteen "world's leading Internet technology achievements." This year Huawei Released the world's first artificial intelligence mobile phone chip unicorn 970 to use this chip technology.
In terms of financing, in August 2017, Cambrian completed a one-hundred-million-dollar A round of financing by Venture Capital, Alibaba Ventures, Legend Capital, NSG Investment, Zhongke Tuling, Yuanhe Origin, Joint venture to become the first unicorn start-up in the field This round of financing so that the Cambrian valuation reached 1 billion US dollars.
At today's conference, at a speech delivered by the Director of the CAS Bureau of Science and Communication Bureau, Zhou Dejin, the Cambrian created a smart chip with deep learning capabilities. Such a result is indeed a glorious calculation and a glorious person in the Academy of Sciences It is even more honorable for Chinese people.
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sun Ninghui director, said the Cambrian company is calculating the CAS Institute of Computing and artificial intelligence in the field of cross-cutting layout of the crystallization in the new situation and new opportunities, should focus on nurturing and expanding to Cambrian companies Represented by artificial intelligence based hardware and software companies, for the development of China's smart industry into new momentum.At the same time, he pointed out that the Cambrian company in the field of smart chip occupies a leading position in the world, through cooperation with upstream and downstream partners, is expected to lead China's artificial intelligence industry 'Road change overtaking'.