Mining machine giant Bitmain launches third-generation AI chip, lands 216 million-scale Fuzhou City Brain

Bitmain co-founder and chairman Zhan Ketuan said that the company does not sell algorithms, but rather hopes to be friends with algorithm companies, and the chip has specially integrated algorithm encryption technology.

Entering 2019, the pace of AI chip market landing has further accelerated. If autonomous driving is too far away, then city-level intelligent computing projects are just enough to support the large-scale landing of chips.

Therefore, we see that there is another chip player in the cruel competition of the security market. Previously, algorithm chip manufacturer Yitu launched its first cloud Edge AI Chip "Seeking" Cambrian This year, the company will also focus its product line on cloud acceleration chips, launching the "Siyuan 270" and Huawei Today, Bitmain, which has been silent for a long time, took the stage with a new generation of TPU chips.

September 17 Synced According to news, at the Fuzhou City Brain and Northeast Fujian Informatization Strategic Cooperation Conference, Bitmain launched the third-generation AI chip BM1684, and announced that BM1684 will be used as the underlying computing power to empower the construction of Fuzhou City Brain and assist in the construction of Digital Fuzhou and Digital China.

At the event, the top-level design outline of Fuzhou City Brain was announced, featuring highlights such as domestically produced chips, independent control, and an open ecosystem, marking the full launch of the construction of the country's first independent and open city brain. This year, Fuzhou's "City Brain" project will build a common basic platform and six application areas, a total of 11 projects, with a total investment budget of approximately 216 million yuan, and encapsulate 18 application scenarios in the first eight application areas.

At the event, the Fuzhou City Brain Innovation Industry Alliance and the Fuzhou City Brain Research Institute were established. The first batch of member units include the chairman unit Bitmain, the vice chairman unit Baidu , Huawei , Hikvision , Peking University Qianfang, CloudWalk, Rockchip, etc., as well as Yitu, SenseTime, Megvii and other units.

To improve performance by 6 times, you need to make friends with algorithm companies

Bitmain's city brain dedicated chip - Suanfeng's third-generation AI chip BM1684, focusing on cloud and edge applications AI For inference, it adopts TSMC's 12nm process. Under the premise of typical power consumption of only 16 watts, the FP32 precision computing power reaches 2.2 TFlops, and the INT8 computing power can be as high as 17.6Tops. Under Winograd convolution acceleration, the INT8 computing power is increased to 35.2Tops. It is a low-power, high-performance SoC chip.

Bitmain co-founder and chairman Zhan Ketuan introduced on site that BM1684 has built-in Tensor The computing module TPU contains 64 NPU computing units, each NPU includes 16 EU units, a total of 1024 EU computing units, and billions of transistors.

Zhan Ketuan shows the comparison between BM1684 and its competitors in image processing efficiency and power consumption ratio

BM1684 is specially optimized for video processing. A single chip supports up to 32-channel H264/H265 decoding capabilities, 480 frames per second JPEG/PNG image encoding and decoding, 960 fps@1080p video decoding capabilities, and a built-in video image pre- and post-processing hardware acceleration module.

In addition, BM1684 also supports 16 PCIE3.0 lanes, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and has features such as multi-chip cascading.

It is worth mentioning that Zhan Ketuan said that the company does not sell algorithms, but hopes to be friends with algorithm companies. The chip integrates algorithm encryption technology. The BM1684 chip has built-in Trustzone, secureboot and a variety of encryption and decryption algorithms to protect customers' data and models safely and reliably, and create a safe and reliable computing environment.

BM1684 also provides a powerful Deep Learning Model compiler and software SDK development kit, supporting mainstream Deep Learning Frameworks, including Caffe, Tensorflow, Mxnet, Pytorch, etc., developers can easily convert fully trained Neural Networks The model is transplanted to the BM1684 platform, supports video structured analysis, and can be applied to Face Detection It can provide powerful computing power guarantee for scenarios such as image recognition and license plate recognition, and various decisions such as the city brain.

Bitmain was founded in 2013 and entered the AI ​​chip field in 2016. Its revenue in 2018 was RMB 23 billion, and its cumulative tax payment exceeded RMB 5 billion. It has now become one of the top ten fabless chip design companies in the world and the second in China. It has mass-produced and released a number of cloud BM168X series and terminal BM188X series. AI The chip is specially optimized for video structuring, focusing on scenarios such as city brain and smart communities.

Smart communities are mainly used through Edge computing The box's carrier realizes applications including contactless reception, intelligent monitoring, intelligent passage, building access control, smart retail, smart patrol, garbage classification, etc.

China currently has more than 300 cities with a population of over one million. Each city with a population of one million may have an economy worth hundreds of billions. Large-scale modern economies generate very valuable data. Discovering the value of this data requires powerful computing power. The city brain is the inevitable product of the advanced stage of urban informatization development, and the computing power center is the core component of the city brain.

At the press conference, Bitmain co-founder and chairman Zhan Ketuan said that Bitmain’s third-generation cloud Edge AI Chip BM1684, as the infrastructure of the entire system, will provide powerful computing power for the city brain.

AI chips support the first autonomous open city brain

As one of the earliest urban brain projects in China, Fuzhou City Brain is an important information infrastructure for the transformation of Fuzhou's urban governance from digitalization to intelligence. It connects data scattered in various corners of the city, and through the analysis and integration of large amounts of data, conducts real-time analysis, command, mobilization and management of the entire city, and effectively allocates public resources, thereby achieving accurate analysis, overall judgment, and coordinated command of the city, and realizing the intelligence of urban operations, administrative management and public services.

Fuzhou City Brain uses intelligence cloud computing , Internet of Things, 5G , Big Data, AI , Blockchain It is an open intelligent operation service platform and digital intelligent industry co-creation platform built on new-generation information technologies to support and promote the digital and intelligent transformation of economic, social, cultural and ecological construction.

In the future, Fuzhou City Brain will become the intelligent center and new intelligent infrastructure for "Digital Fuzhou" and Fuzhou's urban digital upgrading and evolution, and a new engine for the development of Fuzhou's digital economy.

Fuzhou City Brain can be vividly summarized as "one cloud, one lake, and one ecosystem", namely an autonomous and controllable AI computing cloud, a fused and shared data lake, and an open and innovative ecosystem. An ecosystem includes the three levels of open algorithm ecosystem, scenario application ecosystem, and collaborative innovation ecosystem.

The main construction content of Fuzhou's "City Brain" is "131N", namely 1 center, 3 platforms, 1 IOC and N innovative application scenarios.

Among them, 1 center refers to the AI ​​computing power center; 3 platforms refer to the city big data platform, the city open algorithm platform and Perception Convergence service platform; 1 IOC, namely the urban intelligent operation center; N projects and innovative application scenarios refer to innovative application scenarios of the urban brain in 10 fields including economic operation, urban management, public safety, transportation, marine governance, ecological protection, emergency management, business environment, government services, and public services, as well as county (city) district characteristics.

Overall, Fuzhou City Brain has five highlights: 1. Dedicated chips, autonomous and controllable; 2. Open ecology, enabling innovation; 3. Mechanism innovation, application traction; 4. Overall coordination, reuse and sharing; 5. Iterative evolution, sustainable development.

The release of Bitmain's third-generation AI chip and the top-level design outline of Fuzhou City Brain marks that my country has taken the lead in entering a new stage of smart city construction. In the future, it will promote my country's urbanization process, improve the level of urban governance, and accelerate the intelligent transformation of urban management.