A deep dive from EE Times, February 17:
Data center AI systems startup Positron, just 18 months old, has been shipping its FPGA-based LLM inference systems to customers since last summer, and recently delivered the first systems in a multi-million-dollar order to its Tier 2 CSP customer, Positron CTO and co-founder Thomas Sohmers told EE Times.
“It’s been a really great start to the year and we expect that customer and a number of others to be scaling significantly in the first half of this year,” Sohmers said.
A further 20 potential customers are currently evaluating Positron’s FPGA-based AI appliance, Atlas, either directly or remotely, Sohmers said. Positron customers include enterprises running on-prem or co-located infrastructure, and Tier 2 CSPs.
“Most of the conversations we’ve been having, especially about larger scale [deployments], have been with companies that either are themselves CSPs or companies providing scaled web services,” Sohmers added.
Seed funding
Positron was founded in April 2023 by Sohmers and chief scientist Edward Kmett. Both had previously been working at AI inference startup Groq. The company appointed a new CEO, Mitesh Agrawal, who joined from AI CSP Lambda earlier this month, and raised $23.5 million in funding....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
March 2024 - "Making GenAI more efficient with a new kind of chip" (plus some of our history with Nvidia)
....A lot of people see the opportunity in the inference, rather than the training, end of things but inference at the edge could lead to the kind of serendipitous manufacturing—research—discovery feedback loop that Nvidia experienced when they were pushing the limits of using GPUs as accelerators for supercomputers in 2015 -2016.....September 2024 - Chips: The Pivot From Training To Inference (where Nvidia's dominance isn't as strong)
Inference, it's all anyone is talking about.(I obviously don't get out enough)October 2024 - "OpenAI, Broadcom Working to Develop AI Inference Chip" (AVGO; TSM)
November 2024 - "Nvidia (NVDA) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript"
January 2025 - Chips: "How Big A Threat Are Custom AI Chips To Nvidia Stock?" (NVDA; AVGO)
And many, many more.
Xilinx was our go-to FPGA stock. It was bought-out in a $60 billion 2022 deal with AMD.
