China challenges the US and launches rival NVIDIA GPU

The reasons why there are tensions between China and Taiwan are varied, but there are those who see in the fight against semiconductors with USA one of the main reasons. Due to the technological gap, China has never really proved itself up to par when it comes to chips for smartphones and PCs, so often having to rely on companies such as Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and MediaTek. And if in the smartphone field, companies like SMIC e UNISOC they are helping China to become more independent, in the PC sector the situation is more delicate. Precisely for this reason, it makes the news that an unknown company like of two has succeeded in the enterprise of producing one Chinese GPU able to challenge (on paper) those of the most famous US companies.

The fight against semiconductors between China and the US continues, this time in the world of GPUs

Founded in 2019 with headquarters in Shanghai, Biren Technology took everyone by surprise by presenting the Biren BR100, the fastest GPU ever seen leaving China. It is a graphics card for general use, made with a production process 7 nm, with 1.074 mm chip² and with well 77 billion transistors: to understand, a GPU like the NVIDIA RTX 3090 at 8 nm has 28,3 billion, while the NVIDIA Hopper H100 at 4 nm reaches 80 billion. So many transistors make the BR100 able to simulate the behavior of nerve cells in the human brain, making the China less dependent on NVIDIA's GPUs for artificial intelligence and neural networks.

The Biren GPU takes advantage of TSMC's 2.5D CoWoS design, offers 300 MB of cache, 64 GB of HBM2e and a 2,3 TB / s bandwidth with PCIe Gen 5.0 support. These specifications ensure that the BR100 has performance equal to 2.048 TOPS (INT 8), 1.024 TFLOP (BF16), 512 TFLOP (TF32 +) and 256 TFLOP (FP32), up to 2,8 times more powerful than the NVIDIA Ampere A100 (but less than 2,5 times as powerful as the Hopper H100). In addition to this, then, there is also the Biren BR104 GPU in the standard PCIe format, with a TDP of 300W and half the power compared to the BR100.