AI startup Graphcore launches Nvidia competitor

A British chip startup has launched what it claims is the world's most complex AI chip, the Colossus MK2 or GC200 IPU (intelligence processing unit). The MK2 and its predecessor MK1 are designed specifically to handle very large machine-learning models. The MK2 processor has 1,472 independent processor cores and 8,832 separate parallel threads, all supported by 900MB of in-processor RAM. Graphcore says the MK2 offers a 9.3-fold improvement in BERT-Large training performance over the MK1, a 8.5-fold improvement in BERT-3Layer inference performance, and a 7.4-fold improvement in EfficientNet-B3 training performance. BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a technique for natural language processing pre-training developed by Google for natural language-based searches.