A Cambrian Explosion In Deep Learning, Part 2: The Startups

This is the second of three blogs on the state of the AI chip market and what's to come in 2019. The year will be a festival of new chips and benchmark battles, led by the large companies I mentioned in the first blog ( Intel, Google, AMD, Xilinx, Apple, Qualcomm), and joined by dozens of Silicon Valley startups and Chinese Unicorns sporting valuations in excess of a billion US dollars. In this section, I will cover the most prominent, or at least the loudest, of the startups in the West and in China, where the government is intent on creating an indigenous AI chip industry. We will start with Wave, which appears to be the first to market with silicon for training. Wave Computing had an eventful 2018, taping out its first DataFlow Processing Unit, acquiring MIPS, creating MIPS Open, and shipping its first early systems to a few lucky customers.