Baidu Accelerator Rises in AI

Kunlun chip claims 30x performance of FPGAs

Rick Merritt, EETimes
7/6/2018 00:01 AM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. — China’s Baidu followed in Google’s footsteps this week, announcing it has developed its own deep learning accelerator. The move adds yet another significant player to a long list in AI hardware, but details of the chip and when it will be used remain unclear.

Baidu will deploy Kunlun in its data centers to accelerate machine learning jobs for both its own applications and those of its cloud-computing customers. The services will compete with companies such as Wave Computing and SambaNova who aim to sell to business users appliances that run machine-learning tasks.

Kunlun delivers 260 Tera-operations/second while consuming 100 Watts, 30 times as powerful as Baidu’s prior accelerators based on FPGAs. The chip is made in a 14nm Samsung process and consists of thousands of cores with an aggregate 512 GBytes/second of memory bandwidth.

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