中国可能成为NVIDIA竞争对手筹集了3亿美元
This is on top of a couple of rounds of seed funding round said to be worth “hundreds of millions of dollars.” These were announced in February 2021, shortly after the company’s formation in October 2020 (see中国gpu/ai“独角兽”是为了接受nvidia的).
该公司现在拥有超过50万美元的资金来资助其第一个GPU芯片的数量制造，该芯片现已完成。该公司表示，最新的资金还将支持与GPU系统芯片开发项目以及扩展国内生态系统相关的研发，以利用GPU技术。
The company’s mission is to build a computing platform in the field of visual computing and artificial intelligence in China and develop world-leading GPU intellectual property. In other words to compete with Nvidia, which is reckoned to have about 80 percent of the Chinese GPU/AI market.
该公司由创始人兼CEO James Zhang, who was previously a vice president and general manager at Nvidia. Zhang reportedly left Nvidia in September 2020 when he was general manager of Nvidia’s Greater China business. Moore Threads said in a statement issued early in 2021 that engineers have also been recruited from Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel, AMD, ARM and other major technology companies,
The latest funding round was led jointly Shanghai Guosheng Capital, Wuyuan Capital, and BOC International’s Bohai Zhongsheng Fund, CCB International, Qianhai Fund of Funds, and China Merchants Securities. These VCs participated with nine other institutions.
Moore Threads said the first domestically designed full-featured GPU chip has been developed on schedule. The chip has built-in independently developed 3D graphics computing cores, AI training and inference computing cores, high-performance parallel computing cores, and ultra-high-definition video encoding and decoding accelerators.
下一步：SMIC还是TSMC？
However, what remains unclear is with which foundry substantial parts of the latest round of funding will be spent.
Nvidia is already on 7nm manufacturing processes and is heading to 5nm and 3nm with leading foundries Samsung and TSMC. Although Moore Threads is not believed to be on a US entity list, if it went to TSMC it could risk being listed, but if it seeks domestic production then its only option is Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which has a 14nm FinFET process in production and a so-called ‘N+1 process’ which is slated to follow. This has been described as a “nearly-7nm” manufacturing process that will be key to the decoupling of China’s electronics industry from the west (seeChina’s Innosilicon tapes out on SMIC’s ‘nearly-7nm’ process).
Moore Threads said China’s annual GPU server market is expected to be worth US$6.4 billion in 2024 and enjoy a 27 percent annual growth rate over the next five years. “Faced with such a fast-growing Chinese market, it is imperative to accelerate the research and development of domestic GPUs,” said Moore Threads in a translated statement.
该公司还认为其角色的一部分是开发中国生态系统来利用其GPU。摩尔线程表示，它已经与数百个合作伙伴建立了合作关系，以促进国内GPU应用程序软件的共同开发，绩效优化和应用创新。
The applications Moore Threads is seeking to enable are the usual ones of digital twins, industrial simulation, digital cultural creation, smart energy, smart cities, smart medical, autonomous driving, robotics, digital humans, biological computing and so on.
BOC International的子公司Bohai Zhongsheng Fund的主席Wang Lixin在翻译声明中说：“元，自动驾驶，机器人技术，生物计算等都与GPU的授权以及对GPU Chips的需求不可分割的可能看到爆炸性的增长。”他补充说，完成中国首个全功能GPU的研究和发展不到一年。
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China’s Innosilicon tapes out on SMIC’s ‘nearly-7nm’ process
