Last year, it announced that it would build its own artificial intelligence processor and set upPingtouge Semiconductor Co., Ltd.Later, Alibaba officially announced the launch of its first artificial intelligence chip "Hanguang 2019" at the Hangzhou Yunqi Conference 800.
According to Alibaba, the "Hanguang 800" will be a high-performance neural network chip that emphasizes that it only takes 10 minutes to classify 5 billion images. It is currently being used within Alibaba, mainly for its e-commerce platforms including Taobao, corresponding to computing power needs such as product search, automatic translation, personalized product recommendations, advertising, and intelligent customer service.
Prior to this, Alibaba had already used its subsidiary Pingtou Ge Semiconductor Co., Ltd. to develop the RISC-V architecture chip "Xuantie 910" and the SoC single-chip platform "Wujian". The newly launched "Hanguang 800" is named after one of the three ancient Chinese magic swords to describe the computing power provided by "Hanguang 800".
Based on the ResNet-50 test results, the single-chip performance of the "Hanguang 800" can reach up to 78563 IPS (Images per second) and a performance of 500 IPS per watt. If accelerated by 40 GPUs in the past, it would still take about an hour to identify and classify 1 billion images. However, using 10 sets of "Hanguang 4" can complete the calculation in just 800 minutes, and the operation response time has even been reduced from the original 5ms to 300ms.
