Golf Jiao, a co-founder and general manager of Biren Technology, has left the company late last month according to insider sources in China. No official statement has been issued by the executive team at Biren Tech, and Jiao has not provided any details regarding his departure from the fabless semiconductor design company. The Shanghai-based firm is a relatively new startup - it was founded in 2019 by several former NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Alibaba veterans. Biren Tech received $726.6 million in funding for its debut range of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), also defined as high-performance computing graphics processing units (HPC GPUs).

The company revealed its ambitions to take on NVIDIA's Ampere A100 and Hopper H100 compute platforms, and last August announced two HPC GPUs in the form of the BR100 and BR104. The specifications and performance charts demonstrated impressive figures, but Biren Tech had to roll back its numbers when it was hit by U.S Government enforced sanctions in October 2022. The fabless company had contracted with TSMC to produce its Biren range, and the new set of rules resulted in shipments from the Taiwanese foundry being halted. Biren Tech cut its work force by a third soon after losing its supply chain with TSMC, and the engineering team had to reassess how the BR100 and BR104 would perform on a process node larger than the original 7 nm design. It was decided that a downgrade in transfer rates would appease the legal teams, and get newly redesigned Biren silicon back onto the assembly line.It seems that Golf Jiao had to deal with these external legal headaches as well as internal conflict at Biren Technology. The insider sources claim that friction within the research and development team had dampened Jiao's own ambitions to diversify their hardware line into more traditional GPU purposes. Last September the company announced plans to create a range of mainstream GPUs for gaming and general desktop tasks. Jiao was revealed as the chief architect of this new endeavor, and his past experiences in this field were not questioned given decades of experience. He had a noticeable stint at Qualcomm, and spent 11 years as head of its GPU team - Jiao was a key person in designing five generations of Adreno architectures. The insider sources also hint that the top brass at Biren Tech have been reluctant to dedicate too many resources to the traditional graphics GPU projects, and the executives would prefer to concentrate on mainline high-performance/general-purpose offerings.