SemiFive helps bring up Nvidia-beating Chatbot processor

Business news | June 27, 2023

By Peter Clarke

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SemiFive Co. Ltd. (Seongnam, South Korea), a high-performance chip designer, has said the Atom from Rebellions Inc. (Seoul, South Korea) is the second commercialization of its 5nm HPC SoC platform built using Samsung Foundry.

The first such chip was FuriosaAI’s Warboy chip which SemiFive helped bring into manufacturing by Samsung (see SemiFive helps FuriosaAI ‘Warboy’ processor get to market).

Rebellions’ Atom is an inference-only chip designed to run computer vision, chatbot AI applications and recommendation models. Rebellions claims it consumes only about 20 percent of the power of the Nvidia’s more generic A100 chip when performing those tasks because it has been optimized for them (see South Korean startup Rebellions launches AI processor).

SemiFive’s SoC Platform includes a high-performance interleaved memory system consisting of four channels of GDDR6 and 16 lanes of PCIe Gen5 high speed interface. Together with a quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cluster for balanced high performance and compute power efficiency, the platform includes complete system and other peripheral IPs which are all pre-verified and integrated.

The Atom SoC has achieved ResNet50 single-stream latency of 0.239ms and BERT-Large single-stream latency of 4.297ms on the latest MLPerf Inference v3.0 benchmark.

Rebellions worked with SemiFive providing the neural core IP and SemiFive delivered complete packaged parts and evaluation boards back to Rebellions for testing and benchmarking. Mass production of Atom SoCs is expected to start in the middle of 2024.

Atom has already been deployed in KT Cloud the data centre service spun out from Korea Telecom in February 2022.

“Thanks to SemiFive’s unique SoC Platform technology coupled with their excellent packaging and ‘bring-up’ expertise, we were able to meet key milestones and technical specifications of Atom, which will be a game changer solution in this era of intensive AI applications like the popular ChatGPT,” said Sunghyun Park, CEO of Rebellions, in a statement issued by SemiFive.

“We have prepared a comprehensive line-up of advanced FinFET and gate-all-around process technologies, as well as a broad design enablement portfolio and advanced packaging solutions for innovators to harness the full potential of our total solution,” said Gibong Jeong, head of the foundry business development team at Samsung Electronics.