Baidu and Samsung’s Kunlun AI Chip Ready for Mass Production Next Year

Samsung Electronics has teamed up with Baidu to produce its new cloud-to-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Kunlun, with mass production slated for early next year, the companies announced. This is the first such partnership between the South Korean tech giant and Chinese search leader.

Baidu’s 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-nm process technology with its I-Cube (Interposer-Cube) package solution.

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The chip offers 512GB per second memory bandwidth and supplies up to 260 Tera operations per second at 150 watts. In addition, the chip will use Baidu‘s natural language processing framework, Ernie, which it touts as being three times faster than conventional GPUs.

The companies noted that with the chip, Baidu will be able to support large-scale AI workloads such as search ranking, speech recognition, image processing, deep learning, and autonomous driving.

In April, Samsung developed a 5nm semiconductor process with plans of expanding its contract chip making business into more high performance computing chips to be used for cloud and edge computing. The South Korean tech giant also hopes to become the global leader in logic chips, and announced earlier this year that it will invest $120 billion into the area by 2030.