Graphcore adds WoW to IPU

Author: EIS Release Date: Mar 10, 2022

By moving its 7nm  IPU to TSMC’s Wafer-on-Wafer technology, Graphcore has increased its performance by up to 40% and its power efficiency by 16%, says the company.

 

By moving its 7nm  IPU to TSMC’s Wafer-on-Wafer technology, Graphcore has increased its performance by up to 40% and its power efficiency by 16%, says the company.

 

WoW stacks two flipped  wafers together, connects them through TSVs and bonds them  before dicing. Graphcore says this is the first commercial use of the technology.

 

In the Graphcore IPU, the top wafer delivers the power and the bottom one the processing. Graphcore calls the upgraded IPU ‘Bow’. Graphcore is selling Bow at the same price as the original IPU.

 

According to Graphcore CTO Simon Knowles, Bow is “the highest-performing AI processor in the world” – delivering 89 PetaFlops of AI compute.

 

Graphcore intends to use Bow to build a computer called Good, after computer pioneer Jack Good, delivering 10 Exa-Flops of AI floating compute, with up to 4 Petabytes of memory, having a bandwidth of 10 Petabytes/second and costing $120 million. It is targeting 2024 for the launch.