[Cai Zhi Headline] Byte beating confirmation of self -developed chip software and hardware integration into an industry trend

Since last year, rumors about bytes' self -developed chips have continued.

On July 19, a spokesman for byte beating company officially confirmed that the company is indeed considering designing its own chip.

The spokesman of the byte beating said that the company is exploring chip design that can be used in professional fields because the company cannot find a supplier that can meet its requirements. These chips customized for demand will help handle the related working loads in the fields of video platforms, information and entertainment applications.

He emphasized that byte beating will not sell self -developed chips to other companies.

Picture source: network

There is a long time in the chip

It is understood that byte -beating chip research and development teams are divided into three categories: server chips, AI chips, and video cloud chips. Among them, the person in charge of the server chip team is a senior person in the former Qualcomm North American R & D team. In addition, in order to develop the chip, the byte beating has also dug a lot of talents from companies such as Huawei Hisilicon, ARM.

In fact, as early as April 2018, Yang Zhenyuan, the vice president of byte beating, said that byte beating has the largest number of users in the world to upload videos to analyze and understand. A large number of chip procurement and applications are currently actively seeking breakthroughs in chip -related fields.

In March 2021, the byte beating on its official website released 12 chip -related positions, including chip applications (ARM software and hardware optimization), chip application (ARM hardware, Beijing/Shanghai), chip CAD engineer, chip comprehensive/STA engineer , Chip DFT engineer, chip back -end design engineer, chip CAD, etc. At that time, there were media reports that bytes were being developed by self -developed cloud AI chips and ARM server chips.

In this regard, the person in charge of the byte beating only responded: "It is setting up related teams to do some exploration in the field of AI chips."

In June of this year, the byte beating has launched multiple chip -related post recruitment information. The school recruitment website has released multiple SOC system development, design and verification of internship post recruitment notice. The work location is mainly located in Beijing and Shanghai. The recruitment details page shows that the byte beating requires the request to be familiar with the RISC-V or ARMV8 system architecture. For employees who develop and verify positions in the system, there are also requirements for the X86 system architecture.

Byte Beat official website recruitment

At the same time as the self -developed chip, the byte beating has also invested in a number of chip manufacturers in recent years, including Him computing, Moore thread, Runshi Technology, Ruisin core, Shanghai Cloud Semiconductor, Guangzhou Semiconductor, and Guangzhou Semiconductor, Gwangzhou Semiconductor, and Guangzhou Semiconductor, Gwangzhou Semiconductor, and Guangzhou Semiconductor. Poetry microelectronics, etc.

Internet/cloud service giant self -developed chip has become a trend

In recent years, it is not uncommon for Internet/cloud service giants to develop self -developed chips. Alibaba, Google, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent and other manufacturers have launched self -developed chips. The main directions are AI chips and ARM server chips.

Alibaba established "Pingtou Ge Semiconductor Co., Ltd." in 2018. Subsequently, the company successively released the ARM server chip "Yitian", AI chip "Light", RISC-V architecture CPU core "Xuan Tie", and RFID (RF recognition) chip "feather array", the layout covers from the cloud to the terminal to the terminal to the terminal chip. In addition, in the Shenlongyun server released by Pingtou in 2017, the smart network card chip X-DRAGON is also designed, that is now the popular DPU (data processor) on the market.

On June 13 this year, Alibaba Cloud announced the launch of Cloud Infrastruction Processing Units (CIPU) and referred to it as a new type of cloud data center special processor. According to the company, the CIPU has a rapidly cloud -based computing, storage, network resources and acceleration of the data center, and accelerate the hardware to access the "flying sky" cloud operation system, which can connect millions of servers worldwide into a super computer.

Tencent began a self -developed picture encoding FPGA as early as 2015. In 2020, Tencent established the Penglai Lab that focused on chip research and development to achieve full coverage of chip end -to -end design and verification. Prior to this, the company also invested in Cloud AI chip companies, Takaraki Technology.

In November 2021, Tencent made the first public research chip progress. The company launched three self -developed chips, including "Zixiao", which is based on AI, "Canghai" for video processing, and "Xuanling" for high -performance networks. Among them, the performance of "Zixiao" has increased by 100%compared with the industry, successful and smoothly lit; the compression rate of "Canghai" has increased by more than 30%compared to the industry; "Xuanling" performance has been 4 times compared to the industry products.

In 2018, Baidu announced its self -developed AI chip "Kunlun" and established an independent company -Kunlunxin (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Kunlunxin). In December 2019, Baidu announced that the Kunlun -generation chip has been developed, which will be founded by Samsung 14nm process. In early 2020, it can be applied in the field of search ranking, voice recognition, image processing, and natural language processing.

In August 2021, Baidu CEO Li Yanhong personally released the second -generation Baidu Kunlun AI chip "Kunlunxin 2" and announced the realization of mass production. The chip adopts a 7nm process, equipped with a self -developed second -generation XPU architecture, which can be applied to the Internet, smart cities, smart industries and other fields. It can also empower high -performance computer clusters, biological computing, intelligent transportation, driverless driving industries. In mid -May of this year, Bloomberg quoted people familiar with the matter and reported that Kunlun core was seeking a new round of 2 billion yuan in financing. If the investment is finalized, the company's valuation will increase from 13 billion yuan in the first round of financing more than a year ago to 17 billion yuan.

Industrial trends have forced self -developed chip tide and hard and hard integrated demand

Li Yanhong, the founder and chairman of Baidu, once said: "The existing solutions and technologies in the market cannot meet its requirements for AI computing power. It is why Baidu decides to develop chips."

Qiu Yuepeng, President of Tencent Cloud and Tencent Cloud, revealed: "Tencent Cloud is facing the three directions of massive computing power, real -time analysis, and extreme transmission to continuously consolidate the technical foundation. Chip is the core infrastructure of the industry Internet . Facing AI computing, video processing, and high -performance network, there are three scenes of strong demand, Tencent conducted chip research and development. "

For Internet technology companies, software is only an engine. If you want to develop technology to protect the city, you must make up for the key shortcomings of chip design and research and development. Qiu Yuepeng admits: "With the development of the cloud computing industry, the trend of hardware and hardness is becoming more and more obvious, and software definitions are unstoppable."

With the advent of intelligence, 5G, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, autonomous driving, industrial Internet and other fields have become the industry. As its core hardware, the chip is constantly increasing demand and technical requirements. If Internet companies want to make breakthroughs in these emerging fields, "soft" technology such as software and commercial operations alone are not enough. They must start with "hard" technology and develop strong high -performance chips as hardware support. Realize hard and hard integration. Although traditional chip design companies can provide chip technical support for Internet companies, with the complexity of application scenarios, it is difficult to meet the unique needs of chip design. In addition, Internet companies are reluctant to share their scene needs directly with design companies because they involve many secrets. Therefore, due to factors such as differentiated competition and supply chain security, Internet companies choose cross -border self -developed chips to create an exclusive ecosystem in combination with systems and software.

(WeChat public account "Cai Zhi Headline" comprehensive self: Daily Economic News, China Electronics News, Beijing Daily, etc.)

Edit: Yuan Kai

School pair: Fenghua

Review: Gong Zimo

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