South Korean startup Sapeon unveils 7nm X330 AI chip

AI startup Sapeon, backed by South Korean telecommunications giant SK Group, announced the X330 chip, designed for inference and maintenance of large language models (LLM). The product will form the basis of specialized accelerators for data centers.

Sapeon says the new neural processing unit (NPU) delivers approximately twice the performance and 1.3 times better power efficiency than competitor products launched this year. Compared to the previous solution of the company itself - Sapeon X220 - a fourfold increase in performance and a twofold increase in energy efficiency are achieved.

The new product will be manufactured at TSMC using 7nm technology. Mass production is planned for the first half of 2024. Based on the chip, two accelerators will be offered - X330 Compact Card and X330 Prime Card. Both have a single-slot design and are equipped with a passive cooling system. The PCIe 5.0 x16 interface is used for connection. The cards can perform INT8, FP8 and FP16 calculations.

The X330 Compact Card model of reduced length carries on board 16 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of up to 256 GB/s. The declared performance on FP8 and FP16 operations reaches 367 and 184 Tflops, respectively. Power consumption varies from 75 to 120 W. The full-size modification of the X330 Prime Card received 32 GB of GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of up to 512 GB/s. The declared performance of FP8 and FP16 is up to 734 and 368 Tflops. Energy consumption - 250 W.

The SK Group has recently been actively investing in the development of AI, investing directly or through subsidiaries in both software and hardware. In particular, another South Korean developer of AI chips, Rebellions, is also associated with it, also supported by the country’s government, which intends to increase the share of domestic AI chips in local data centers to 80% by 2030. This is done in order to reduce dependence on foreign solutions and avoid shortages. Sapeon itself is preparing at least two more generations of its chips.