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一家芯片初创公司,单挑Nvidia和Intel
半导体行业观察· 2025-10-23 01:01
Core Viewpoint - NextSilicon is set to launch Maverick-2, the world's first Intelligent Compute Accelerator (ICA), designed to meet the demands of high-performance computing and AI applications while reducing power consumption and costs [2][4]. Group 1: Company Background and Funding - NextSilicon was founded in 2017 and has raised a total of $303 million in seed funding and three rounds of venture capital, with the latest round in June 2021 raising $120 million [4][5]. - The company's valuation reached approximately $1.5 billion during its C round of funding [5]. Group 2: Product Development and Architecture - Maverick-2 is based on a novel architecture that minimizes overhead and maximizes computational power for demanding AI and HPC applications, utilizing a non-Von Neumann data flow architecture [10][11]. - The architecture allows for real-time dynamic optimization of applications, focusing on the most resource-intensive code paths, achieving up to 10 times acceleration with only a quarter of the power consumption [13][14]. Group 3: Technical Specifications of Maverick-2 - Maverick-2 features four computing areas with a total of 224 computing blocks, each containing hundreds of ALUs, and is manufactured using TSMC's 5nm process with 54 billion transistors [16][22]. - The chip offers configurations with 32 RISC-V cores (single die) or 64 RISC-V cores (dual die), with a thermal design power (TDP) of 400W and 750W respectively [22][23]. - Performance metrics include 10.8 TFLOPS for float64 operations and 20.3 TFLOPS for float32 operations in the single die configuration [22]. Group 4: Competitive Landscape and Market Position - NextSilicon aims to differentiate itself from established players like NVIDIA by providing a specialized accelerator for high-performance computing, addressing the limitations of traditional GPU and CPU architectures [7][8]. - The company emphasizes the elimination of vendor lock-in and the ability to run existing CPU code without modification, positioning itself as a revolutionary force in the computing landscape [13][14][34]. Group 5: Introduction of Arbel RISC-V CPU - Alongside Maverick-2, NextSilicon introduced the Arbel RISC-V CPU, designed to handle serial code that is difficult to parallelize, achieving clock speeds of up to 2.5 GHz [26][28]. - The Arbel core features a wide instruction pipeline and advanced memory subsystems, aiming to compete with Intel and AMD's offerings [30][32].