Samsung to start mass-production of Baidu KUNLUN chip early next year

With their first collaboration, the Chinese search giant will provide advanced AI platforms for maximizing AI performance, the semiconductor giant, on the other hand, will expand its foundry business into high-performance computing (HPC) chips

Baidu, one of the largest AI and internet companies in the world and South Korean technology giant Samsung announced today the development of Baidu KUNLUN chip, Baidu’s first cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator.

Built on the internet giant's advanced XPU, a home-grown neural processor architecture for cloud, edge, and AI and Samsung’s 14-nanometer (nm) process technology and I-Cube TM package solution, the newly-developed chip delivers 512 gigabytes per second (GBps) memory bandwidth and supplies up to 260 Tera operations per second (TOPS) at 150 watts, Samsung said in a press release.

We are excited to lead the HPC industry together with Samsung Foundry. 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.

OuYang Jian, Distinguished Architect of Baidu

In addition, the Baidu KUNLUN chip allows Ernie, a pre-training model for natural language processing, to infer three times faster than the conventional GPU/FPGA-accelerating model.

Image Credit: Samsung

With their first collaboration, the Chinese search giant will provide advanced AI platforms for maximizing AI performance, the semiconductor giant, on the other hand, will expand its foundry business into high-performance computing (HPC) chips that are designed for cloud and edge computing. The chip will undergo mass-production early next year.

Baidu KUNLUN is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to datacenter 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

Ryan Lee, vice president of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics