Sometimes you get lucky.
November 21, 2016From the high performance computing geeks at HPC Wire:
Artificial Intelligence: What Could Derail NVIDIA? A Lab in Shenzhen; A Basement in Moscow; An Office in Bristol (NVDA)
November 13, 2017
BRISTOL, England, Nov. 13, 2017 — Graphcore has today announced a $50 million Series C funding round by Sequoia Capital as the machine intelligence company prepares to ship its first Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) products to early access customers at the start of 2018.
The Series C round enables Graphcore to significantly accelerate growth to meet the expected global demand for its machine intelligence processor. The funding will be dedicated to scaling up production, building a community of developers around the Poplar software platform, driving Graphcore’s extended product roadmap, and investing in its Palo Alto-based US team to help support customers.Nigel Toon, CEO at Graphcore said: “Efficient AI processing power is rapidly becoming the most sought-after resource in the technological world. We believe our IPU technology will become the worldwide standard for machine intelligence compute. The performance of Graphcore’s processor, compared to other accelerators, is going to be transformative, whether you are a medical researcher, roboticist, online marketplace, social network or building autonomous vehicles....MORE
...Last month, Graphcore shared preliminary benchmarks demonstrating that its IPU can improve performance of machine intelligence training and inference workloads by 10x to 100x compared with current hardware. One test showed that a developer could use eight IPU PCIe cards to run a training model in the same amount of time as 128 GPU cards....
