Alibaba Group’s semiconductor design arm, T-Head, has unveiled details of its advanced AI chip with capabilities said to be on par with Nvidia’s H20, reports the South China Morning Post. The unveiling comes days after the unit was reportedly being prepared for a potential spin-off and public listing.
According to information on T-Head’s website, the Zhenwu 810E was a “fully self-developed” parallel processing unit (PPU), an application-specific integrated circuit designed for both AI training and inference.
A single card with the T-Head PPU handles a bandwidth of 700 gigabytes per second, which made it on par with Nvidia’s H20–a graphics processing unit tailored by Nvidia specifically for China to comply with US export restrictions. China last year summoned Nvidia over alleged “back door safety risks” in the H20, which signalled a de facto ban on its sales to local firms.