British chip designer Graphcore recently unveiled the Colossus MK2, also known as the GC200 IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit), which it calls the world's most complex chip for AI applications. The chip offers eight times the performance of its predecessor, the Colossus MK1, and is powered by 59.4 billion transistors -- which surpasses the 54 billion transistors in NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) newest top-tier A100 data center GPU. Graphcore plans to install four GC200 IPUs into a new machine called the M2000, which is roughly the size of a pizza box and delivers one petaflop of computing power. On its own, the system is slower than NVIDIA's A100, which can handle five petaflops on its own. To put that into perspective, a human would need to perform a single calculation every second for nearly 31.7 billion years to match what a one exaflop system can do in a single second. The GC200 and A100 are both clearly very powerful machines, but Graphcore enjoys three distinct advantages against NVIDIA in the growing AI market.

Many machine-learning frameworks — including TensorFlow, MXNet, and Caffe — already support graph processing. Graphcore claims the vector …