Chinese startup Zhonghao Xinying is offering a home-grown General Purpose Tensor Processing Unit (GPTPU) as an alternative to international AI training and inferencing hardware, like Nvidia's graphics cards, and Google's TPUs, as reported by the South China Morning Post. These ASIC chips are said to be up to 1.5 times faster than Nvidia's 2020 A100 release based on its Ampere architecture.
Although this is several years and generations behind the capabilities of the latest hardware from its international competition, this shows increasing competitiveness for global compute power and how China may have a path to silicon independence in the future as it explores both traditional GPU and ASIC designs as alternatives.
