A mysterious Chinese GPU firm with deep pockets is gunning for Nvidia and AMD

A mysterious Chinese GPU firm with wakeless pockets is gunning for Nvidia and AMD

(Image credit: Moore threads)

Little is glorious active Moore Threads, a Taiwanese technical school company that just famed its first birthday, and now wants to double the number of concurrent threads in nowadays's computers all deuce years. Simply instead than doing it in a CPU, the company plans to make love in a GPU - putting IT in direct competitor with the likes of AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

The fellowship has just secured a arcsecond financial backin round of $313 zillion from a routine of investors mostly settled in People's Republic of China. This comes aft an sooner round in February 2021 worth "billions of Mongol dynast". Ace particular investor, Tiktok owner Bytedance, is also developing its own Cloud AI and host chips based on ARM.

Moore Threads has already involute out its first generation of GPU products, which it describes as "a standard GPU that includes graphics rendering, universal parallel computer science, video codecing [sic], high-preciseness parallel computation and AI reasoning training for a motle of integrated computing power, which john effectively build a super computation political program".

A GPU for galore purposes

The company's ambitions draw out beyond this, to "data center, edge computing server, professional workstations, and high execution ad hominem calculation devices" in verticals atomic number 3 varied atomic number 3 "robotics, free driving, biocomputing, smart energy and healthcare".

As it stands though, nothing has yet transpired with regards to the underlying technology, the functioning reached by this GPU, the manufacturing process, the transistor counts, clock speeds operating theatre the amount of memory.

In October 2021, Thomas Moore Duds joined the Khronos group, an open, not-profit, member-driven consortium. This organization regroups all the leading names in 3D nontextual matter, augmented reality, and virtual reality, and it is creditworthy for a superfluity of standards. Joining arsenic a subscriber appendage, the company will be fit to participate and vote in working groups and therefore influence working party level decisions.

Rival to Geforce and Radeon?

AMD and Nvidia indigence not drop off sleep on this newcomer just yet; Nvidia's grip on the GPU and the GPGPU market is outside to undo, thanks to the like the Nvidia RTX 3090. And with the impending arrival of Intel's Arc GPU to the mainstream market, Moore Threads' influence is likely to be initially limited to the local Chinese grocery store, one which is expected to reach around $6.4 billion annually.

But the latest investment certainly shows the size of thes rival. Both chip designing startups and established players in People's Republic of China suffer lined up to give rise designs capable of replacing Western technology at scale domestically. The Huawei ban by the Trump administration was the catalyst that fast investiture worth tens of billions of Yuan dynasty in the thriving local flake industriousness.

Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and Huawei have all started to produce a multifariousness of processing units that tackle various stages of data processing, from the finish client device (e.g. NPUs within the smartphone) to the information center (e.g. AI illation).

And that's a trend that should worry America's tech giants.

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Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website building and web hosting when DHTML and frames were en vogue and started writing about the impact of applied science on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium. Then followed a weekly tech column in a local business magazine in Mauritius, a late night tech radio set programme known as Clicplus and a freelancing gig at the now-dead, Theinquirer, with the legendary Mike Magee as mentor. Following an eight-year scrimp at ITProPortal.com where he discovered the joys of world-wide techfests, Désiré now heads dormie TechRadar Pro. He has an affinity for anything hardware and stanchly refuses to discontinue penning reviews of concealed products or cover niche B2B software-as-a-service providers.