A big news came out on Friday - Cambricon, the domestic AI chip startup, completed Round A financing with a total financing of 100 million U.S. dollars.
In addition to the amount, the participants in this round of financing are equally eye-catching: leading investment party SDIC Venture (subsidiary of SDIC Group), Alibaba, Lenovo, National Investment, China Turing Join, former pre-A round of investment, Yuan Ebara points venture capital investment and investment continued to vote.
We also conducted verifications to the Cambrian, confirming that the Cambrian has become the first unicorn startup in the global AI chip.
Cambrian board card
As the first AI chip company in the world to successfully streamline (bulk production of physical chips), the Cambrian released the "Cambrian 1A" deep learning processor in 2016, and when it runs mainstream AI algorithms, performance performance Consumption goes beyond traditional processors.
Prof. Chen Tianshi, founder and chief executive officer of the company, has been deeply cultivating for more than ten years in the field of processor architecture and artificial intelligence. He is an outstanding young scientist renowned by academic circles both at home and abroad. He has won the National Natural Science Foundation of China "Youqing" and CCF-Intel. Young Scholar Award, Chinese Academy of Computers Excellent Doctoral Distinguished Award, etc.
At the same time, the Cambrian was also a company that was incubated by the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS Institute of Computing Technology). It not only carried out angel round financing for the Cambrian period, but also provided long-term support and input.
For this financing, Cambrian CEO Chen Tianshi also accepted an exclusive interview with Lei Feng network. The following is a record of this interview:
Q (public number: Q): First of all, I would like to congratulate the Cambrian on completing A round of financing. This is also the largest round of financing in the field of AI chips as far as we know. See somebody in the workshop that you have now become a brand new unicorn in this field. Can you disclose some information about this round of A financing?
Chen Tianshi: AI chips are part of the "heavy industry" in the entire AI industry. Therefore, the amount of investment required is certainly relatively large. On the other hand, the AI ​​chip can play a key supporting role for the entire AI industry. The leadership and leadership of the Cambrian in the AI ​​chip field also gave capital and markets confidence in the development of the Cambrian.
Cambrian chip
Q: What are the special time nodes behind this financing? In August of last year, you conducted a Pre-A round of financing, and then released the "Cambrian 1A" chip three months later. Is there a connection between the two? By analogy, after the A round of financing, will the Cambrian have more major moves in the near future?
Chen Tianshi: The Cambrian Company currently carries out two rounds of financing. In the first half of last year, the Cambrian Company was established and at the same time carried out the angel round of financing; this year we conducted the A round of financing. Financing is definitely a very direct relationship to the development of the Cambrian. Without the investment of the angel wheel of last year, the Cambrian company is also difficult to quickly commercialize the operation, and the industrialization of scientific research achievements of the Cambrian 1A processor IP (of course, the long-term support and input of the Institute of Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is also very important). This round of A-Financing is to provide more advanced products for everyone.
Q: In an interview at the end of last year, Mr. Chen Tianshi once said: "The chip from R&D, mass production to commercial use is a cycle of years, so everyone will be able to see the use of Cambrian technology in the market next year. The chip products, such as smart phones and security monitoring terminals and cloud servers. "Can you disclose the latest progress in this area?
Chen Tianshi: Many friends in the industry are very concerned about Cambrian products. Please wait patiently for some time.
Cambrian board card
Q: As a startup company that is committed to developing AI chips, what do you think is the positioning of AI chips in all chip systems? Should it be more general-purpose GPU or partial-specific TPU? Or create a series of FPGA platforms and subdivide different scenarios on top of it? Can you briefly talk about the future development path of your AI chip?
Chen Tianshi: With the gradual transition from the information era to the intelligent era, AI chips will be an indispensable carrier for supporting smart computing. Complex deep learning network computing needs are high, which requires more and more powerful computing resources. GPU is currently the mainstream AI computing platform, but its basic framework is not designed for AI after all, and its efficiency is limited by many restrictions.
Although FPGAs can be quickly iterated, they can meet certain computing needs in the short term, but there is still a gap between them and the dedicated AI chip in terms of calculation speed and energy consumption. There are still many companies and colleges and universities that are also tracking the results of our earlier period and developing ASICs for deep learning (such as Google TPU).
The ideal AI chip should be a new type of processor that can have a wide range of applications (including voice, semantics, images, video, and natural language multi-modal processing capabilities), and at the same time have far more CPU and GPU efficiency.
To achieve this goal, it is necessary to have a new set of AI instructions, using instructions for flexible processing, it is possible to support all kinds of algorithm applications on the AI ​​chip can be fast and good. Last year, we proposed the first international AI instruction set, which is the effort in this direction.
Question: The development of chips is actually a very expensive matter. We can see that the semiconductor industry has actually been led by several Silicon Valley giants for a long time. From the point of view of national hard power development, how do you think we can achieve "turning overtaking" in this area of ​​AI chips?
Chen Tianshi: In fact, the success or failure of the chip, in addition to its own efficiency, the ecology is a very critical link. In the past, the information industry, hardware and software ecosystems were built on ARM and x86 instruction sets. Do not follow these Anglo-American instruction sets, the chip is no better, there is no supporting applications and software, it is difficult to succeed in the market. In the smart era of the future, the landscape may change dramatically and new AI ecosystems will emerge.
China has the largest AI market, and a group of companies and institutions such as the Cambrian also have good technology, which may completely affect the international AI ecological development. The core of this is still the AI ​​instruction set. Without the AI ​​instruction set, how the AI ​​chip should be standardized and how the AI ​​software interacts with the underlying hardware is rootless. This is why we proposed the first international AI instruction set.
If we look at the development of national hard power, we should guide and standardize the industry and establish the domestic AI instruction set as the industry standard. As long as the domestic AI instruction set is in place, the opportunity for China to dominate the world AI industry may come.
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