Graphcore claims its M2000 AI computer hits 1 petaflop

Graphcore, a U.K.-based company developing accelerators for AI workloads, this morning unveiled the second generation of its Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), which will soon be made available in the company's M2000 IPU Machine. Graphcore claims this new GC200 chip will enable the M2000 to achieve a petaflop of processing power in an enclosure that measures the width and length of a pizza box. AI accelerators like the GC200 are a type of specialized hardware designed to speed up AI applications, particularly artificial neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. They're often multicore in design and focus on low-precision arithmetic or in-memory computing, both of which can boost the performance of large AI algorithms and lead to state-of-the-art results in natural language processing, computer vision, and other domains. The M2000 is powered by four of the new 7-nanometer GC200 chips, each of which packs 1,472 processor cores (running 8,832 threads) and 59.4 billion transistors on a single die, and it delivers more than 8 times the processing performance of Graphcore's existing IPU products.