South Korean AI chip firm Sapeon is planning to manufacture its new AI chip series X330 using TSMC’s 7-nanometer (nm) node next year, the company’s CTO said. The subsidiary of telco SK Telecom has secured many new customers besides its parent company since the split off in April last year, including NHN Data Center, Sapeon CTO Chung Moo-kyoung said.
The company will start offering 7nm chips next year and is aiming to secure 2 trillion won in accumulated revenue by 2027.
Sapeon gained notice when in 2020 it launched its AI chip X220. The chip was shown to be 2.3 times faster than Nvidia’s A2 GPU in the MLPerf benchmark contest.
X220 was made using a 28nm, but still, outperformed other chips made with 10nm while also being price competitive and power efficient, Chung said.
The chip has now received verification to be stable and complete, enough to be mass-produced, the CTO said.
Its successor X330 is being made with 7nm as it is designed to handle large-scale inductions for data centers, Chung said.
The company is aiming to launch an X500 series in 2027 and will continue to develop new variations of the series, the CTO said.
Most of these chips will be paired with a high bandwidth memory chip, which opens doors for collaboration with affiliate SK Hynix.
This is important as there is increased demand for custom-made chips for specific applications.
Chung also noted that while many of its peers will have trouble increasing their spending to develop advanced chips at 10nm or smaller it won’t have that problem thanks to being part of SK Group.
Source https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=4243
