Moore Threads, a China-based GPU developer, has reportedly raised around $215.4 million in Series B funding to fund continued multi-function GPU research and development. Digi TimesThe funding shows investor confidence in China’s GPU development in general, fueled by the country’s need for AI/ML accelerators, not just for gaming graphics processors.
Since its inception in late 2020, Moore Threads has developed two graphics processors (Sudi and Chunxiao) compatible with the company’s MUSA computing platform and multiple add-in boards (AIBs) built around its basic design. has been introduced. Both multifunction GPUs are designed for a variety of markets, including gaming, cloud computing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, FP32 high performance computing, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Pursuing so many market opportunities allows Moore Threads to attract investors from diverse backgrounds.
In its Series B funding round, Moore Threads has secured $215.4 million from China Mobile and Hexe Health Insurance investment funds. China Mobile can take advantage of his AI/ML, gaming, and cloud computing capabilities on Moore Threads GPUs, while Hexe Health Insurance is probably primarily interested in accelerating artificial intelligence workloads.
Meanwhile, the company has received seed funding and a Series A funding round from ByteDance (owner of Tik Tok), Tencent, Shenzhen Capital Group (SCGC), Sequoia China, and GGV Capital. The Series A funding round brought the company about $313 million.
Moore Threads’ latest Chunxiao is fairly complex with 22 billion transistors, 4096 stream processors, 128 tensor cores, 256 texture units and 256 render outputs running at 1.80 GHz. GPU. The unit supports FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision for a variety of workloads and comes with a video engine that supports AV1, H.264, and H.265 codecs for up to 8K video, at 1080p30 resolution. You can decode up to 32 streams. .
Meanwhile, the Chunxiao-based MTT S80 16GB graphics card should reach its full potential in popular video games in Europe and the US. It’s currently more complex and computationally more powerful than Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3060 (14.4 FP32 TFLOPS vs. 12.7 FP32 TFLOPS) due to faulty drivers.
Still, you can use MTT S80 and its data center-oriented MTT S3000 brother to play popular games in China, remote Android game rendering, VDI, various artificial intelligence, machine learning, light high-performance computing (HPC ). Requires only FP32 precision and video streaming workloads. Basically, Moore Threads’ Chunxiao GPU meets all of the main goals of Chinese GPU developers. In short, it addresses China’s needs in AI/ML, gaming, cloud computing, and video streaming.
Moore Threads has proven they can build fairly complex and capable graphics processors, but the company’s main challenge now is ensuring that these GPUs can handle all the workloads for which they are intended. is. This means developing the driver and the rest of the software stack. A market leader, his Nvidia has spent years honing its drivers to serve the market Moore Threads wants to serve. Only time will tell if Moore Threads can do the same thing in less time. But at least investors seem confident that the company can at least partially replace Nvidia in China.
