South Korean AI chip maker Sapeon plans to manufacture its new AI chipset X330 series using TSMC’s 7-nanometer node next year, according to the company’s CTO.
telco subsidiary SK Telecom has secured several new customers alongside the parent company since the split in April last year, including NHN Data Center, according to Sapeon CTO Chung Moo-kyoung.
The company will start offering 7nm chips next year and aims to secure 2 trillion won in cumulative revenue by 2027.
Sapeon gained notice when in 2020 it launched the AI X220 chip. The chip was shown as 2.3 times faster than Nvidia’s A2 GPU in the MLPerf benchmarking competition.
The X220 is made using 28nm, but it still outperforms other 10nm chips while also being price-competitive and energy efficient, Chung said.
The CTO said the chip has now received verification that it is stable and complete, enough for mass production.
Chung said its successor, the X330, is made of 7 nanometers because it is designed to handle the large-scale inductions of data centers.
The company aims to launch the X500 series in 2027 and will continue to develop new variants of the series, according to the CTO.
Most of these chips will be paired with a high-bandwidth memory chip, opening the doors for cooperation with subsidiary SK Hynix.
This is important because there is a growing demand for chips made specifically for specific applications.
Chung also noted that while many of its peers will have trouble spending more to develop advanced chips at 10nm or smaller, it won’t have that problem thanks to it being part of the SK Group.
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