New Chinese Biren BR100 GPGPU apparently beats Nvidia's Ampere A100

China’s attempts to take on established CPU and GPU makers have not seen much success ever since the country expressed its intent to become less reliant on “Western” technology a few years ago. Most of China’s new consumer-grade chips are years behind entry-level products from Intel, AMD or Nvidia, while the more powerful server-grade and HPC chips are not readily available for testing. Still, progress is being made, at least on the GPGPU front, as a new Chinese company called Biren just presented chips advertised to be faster than Nvidia’s Ampere-based A100 models.

Biren’s BR100 GPGPU was recently introduced at the company’s Explore Summit 2022 and is said to offer impressive processing power that ensures at least 1000 TFLOPS for 16-bit floating point operations and double the performance for 8-bit fixed-point loads. These figures are slightly higher than Nvidia’s A100 Ampere-based GPGPUs from a few years ago. However, the BR100 is not as powerful as Nvidia’s latest Hopper H100 chips launched earlier this summer, which are 2 to 2.5x faster than the A100. The Chinese company also presented a cut-down version named BR104 with half the compute power.

In order to match and surpass Nvidia’s A100 chips, Biren used TSMC’s 7 nm nodes with 2.5D CoWoS packaging to produce the BR100, which features 77 billion transistors. The powerful GPGPU is complemented by 64 GB of HBM2e RAM with 2.3 Gbps bandwidth and supports PCIe 5.0 as well as CXL interfaces. On the other hand, the BR104 features only 32 GB of RAM and is only designed for the PCIe interface, supporting TDPs of up to 300 W.

On top of the BiLiren hardware architecture used for the new chips, Biren is using a proprietary software platform called BIRENSUPA, which supports mainstream deep learning frameworks like Baidu’s PaddlePaddle. This enables Biren’s new chips to be utilized for medical imaging, molecular dynamics and electromagnetic simulations, or even boosting the compute power of China Mobile’s network.

No availability or pricing details for now. These GPGPUs will most likely be available solely in China and only for enterprise clients, so actual comparisons with Nvidia's cards might not be possible. Nevertheless, China is expected to market its CPUs and GPUs worldwide in the following 3-5 years.

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