A mysterious Chinese GPU firm with deep pockets is gunning for Nvidia and AMD

Not much is known about Moore Threads, a Chinese tech company that just celebrated its first birthday, and now wants to double the number of concurrent threads every two years. But rather than doing it in a CPU, the company is planning to do it in a GPU, putting it in direct competition with the likes of AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

The company has just secured a second funding of $313 million from a number of investors mostly based in China. This comes after an earlier funding in February 2021 worth “billions of yuan”. One particular investor, Tiktok owner Bytedance, is also developing its own Cloud AI and server chips based on ARM.

Moore Threads has already rolled out its first generation of GPU products, which it is describes as “a standard GPU that includes graphics rendering, universal parallel computing, video codecing [sic], high-precision parallel computing and AI reasoning training for a variety of integrated computing power, which can effectively build a super computing platform”. 

A GPU for many purposes

Its ambitions however extend beyond this, to “data center, edge computing server, professional workstations, and high performance personal computing devices” in verticals as varied as “robotics, autonomous driving, biocomputing, smart energy and healthcare”.

As it stands though, nothing has yet transpired with regards to the underlying technology, the performance reached by this GPU, the manufacturing process, the transistor counts, clock speeds or the amount of memory.

In October 2021, Moore Threads joined the Khronos group, an open, non-profit, member-driven consortium. This organization regroups all the leading names in 3D graphics, augmented reality, virtual reality and is responsible for a plethora of standards. Joining as a contributor member, they will be able to participate and vote in working groups and therefore influence working group level decisions.

Rival to Geforce and Radeon?

AMD and Nvidia need not lose sleep on that newcomer though. Nvidia’s grip on the GPU and the GPGPU market thanks to the likes of the Nvidia RTX 3090 is unlikely to be loosened. And with the impending arrival of Intel’s Arc GPU in the mainstream market, Moore Threads’s influence is likely to be initially limited to the local Chinese market, one which is expected to reach around $6.4 billion annually.

Both chip designing startups and established players in China have lined up in order to produce designs capable of replacing Western technology at scale domestically. The Huawei ban by the Trump administration was the catalyst that accelerated investment worth tens of billions of yuan in the booming local Chip industry.

Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Huawei have all started to produce a variety of processing units that tackle various stages of data processing, from the end client device (e.g. NPU within the smartphone) to the data center (e.g. AI inference). 

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