Baidu unveils Kunlun AI chip for edge and cloud computing

Baidu today unveiled a new chip for AI, joining the ranks of Google, Nvidia, Intel, and many other tech companies making processors especially for artificial intelligence. Kunlun is made to handle AI models for edge computing on devices and in the cloud via datacenters. The Kunlun 818-300 model will be used for training AI, and the 818-100 for inference. Baidu began working with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips especially designed for deep learning in 2011, the company said. Kunlun is about 30 times faster than the first FPGA chip from Baidu and is able to achieve 260 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and 512 GB/second memory bandwidth, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.