SMIC
Assembly Line
China develops AI chip 3,000 times faster than Nvidia’s A100
In a major breakthrough for the field of artificial intelligence (AI), scientists from China have recently introduced an extraordinary innovation – the All-Analogue Chip Combining Electronics and Light (ACCEL). During a lab experiment, the ACCEL chip demonstrated an impressive computing speed of 4.6 PFLOPS (peta-floating point operations per second), surpassing the speed of one of the most commonly used commercial AI chips, Nvidia’s A100, by a factor of 3,000. Additionally, researchers noted that the Chinese chip’s energy consumption is a staggering 4 million times lower.
Unlike advanced AI chips such as Nvidia’s A100, which rely on sophisticated lithography machines that China lacks access to, the ACCEL chip was manufactured using a cost-effective 20-year-old transistor fabrication process(180 nm), thanks to China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).