Chinese chip designer Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor has unveiled a multi-year GPU architecture roadmap that explicitly targets Nvidia’s next-gen Rubin platform as its main competition, as China continues to push hard to establish viable domestic alternatives to Western silicon for AI training and inference hardware. According to reporting by the South China Morning Post, Iluvatar CoreX’s roadmap outlines four successive GPU architectures, named after Chinese terms associated with the Big Dipper constellation.
The company has said its current architecture, Tianshu, has already outperformed Nvidia’s Hopper generation, while a follow-on design, Tianxuan, has been pitted against Blackwell. A third generation, Tianji, is earmarked as being capable of surpassing Blackwell this year, with a fourth, Tianquan, projected to exceed Rubin by 2027, claims the company. Following this, CoreX will attempt what it describes as a “breakthrough” architectural redesign.
