Samsung to mass produce Baidu's AI chip Kunlum next year

Samsung has joined hands with Chinese-language Internet search company Baidu to produce its new Cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chipset -- Kunlun. The mass production of the chip is scheduled for early next year.

It is pertinent to note that this is the first such collaboration between the South Korean tech giant and the Chinese search giant.

"Baidu Kunlun chip is built on the company's advanced XPU, a home-grown neural processor architecture for cloud, edge, and AI, as well as Samsung's 14-nanometer (nm) process technology with its I-Cube (Interposer-Cube) package solution," Samsung wrote in its newsroom post on Wednesday.

The chipset offers 512 gigabytes per second (GBps) memory bandwidth and supplies up to 260 Tera operations per second (TOPS) at 150 watts.

"We are excited to lead the HPC industry together with Samsung Foundry. Baidu Kunlun is a very challenging project since it requires not only a high level of reliability and performance at the same time, but is also a compilation of the most advanced technologies in the semiconductor industry," OuYang Jian, Architect of Baidu, said in a statement.

"Thanks to Samsung's state of the art process technologies and competent foundry services, we were able to meet and surpass our goal to offer superior AI user experience."

The new chip allows Ernie -- a pre-training model for natural language processing, to infer three times faster than the conventional GPU/FPGA-accelerating model.