Alibaba's AI chip competes directly with Nvidia H20 in a government-supported benchmark exhibition
In a significant move towards AI hardware development, Alibaba's semiconductor unit, T-Head, has unveiled a new AI processor named "PPU". The PPU chip, designed to compete with NVIDIA's AI chips, has been deployed by China Unicom across its infrastructure.
According to the available sources, the PPU chip supports high-bandwidth memory (HBM2e) and boasts a chip-to-chip interconnect speed of 700 GB/s, PCIe support, and a board power of 400 W. Alibaba has, however, not disclosed details about frameworks, toolchains, or compatibility with existing model stacks for the PPU.
NVIDIA's H20, a GPU built for the Chinese market, is a notable competitor to the PPU. The H20, built on Hopper architecture, features 96 GB of HBM3 and approximately 4.0 TB/s of memory bandwidth. However, due to geopolitical issues, the H20 is currently stuck in a purgatory, and independent benchmarks and developer support for the H20 have yet to materialize.
China Unicom has deployed 16,384 of Alibaba's PPU cards across its infrastructure. Together, these cards deliver 3,579 petaflops of compute at the Qinghai facility, with plans to scale beyond the current 20,000 petaflops. The performance of the PPU is claimed to match that of NVIDIA's H20.
During a CCTV broadcast, the PPU accelerator was compared with Nvidia's H20, A800, and Huawei's Ascend 910B. However, the article does not provide specific details about the performance of the PPU in comparison to these competitors.
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