- Baidu Kunlun chip is built on the company’s advanced XPU and Samsung’s 14-nanometer (nm) process technology
- This is the first foundry cooperation between the two companies
Baidu, a Chinese-language Internet search provider, and Samsung Electronics have announced that Baidu’s first cloud-to-edge AI accelerator, Baidu Kunlun, has completed its development and will be mass-produced early next year. The chip offers 512 gigabytes per second (GBps) memory bandwidth and supplies up to 260 Tera operations per second (TOPS) at 150 watts.
“We are excited to start a new foundry service for Baidu using our 14nm process technology. Baidu Kunlun is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to data center applications by developing and mass-producing AI chips. Samsung will provide comprehensive foundry solutions from design support to cutting-edge manufacturing technologies, such as 5LPE, 4LPE, as well as 2.5D packaging,” noted said Ryan Lee, vice president of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics.
First foundry cooperation between the two companies
Through the first foundry cooperation between the two companies, Baidu will provide advanced AI platforms for maximising AI performance. Samsung, on the other hand, will expand its foundry business into high performance computing (HPC) chips that are designed for cloud and edge computing.
“We are excited to lead the HPC industry together with Samsung Foundry,” said OuYang Jian, distinguished architect, Baidu. He added “Baidu Kunlun is a very challenging project since it requires not only a high level of reliability and performance at the same time, but is also a compilation of the most advanced technologies in the semiconductor industry. Thanks to Samsung’s state of the art process technologies and competent foundry services, we were able to meet and surpass our goal to offer superior AI user experience.”
Baidu informed that it can effectively support a wide variety of functions including large-scale AI workloads, such as search ranking, speech recognition, image processing, natural language processing, autonomous driving, and deep learning platforms like PaddlePaddle. This Kunlun chip is built on the Baidu’s advanced XPU and Samsung’s 14-nanometer (nm) process technology.
