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.

If InnoSilicon's Fenghua gaming GPU hit the scene last November seemingly out of nowhere, then another Chinese GPU developer is making waves at HotChips 22, this time in the enterprise space. The BR100 by BIREN is a large AI-HPC GPU-based processor that's China's answer to the Hopper, Ponte Vecchio, and CDNA2, and ensure China's growth as an AI/HPC leader is unaffected in the event of a tech embargo for whatever reason.

The BR100 is an MCM of two planar-silicon dies built on the 7 nm DUV node, with a striking 77 billion transistor-count between them, and 550 W TDP (typical). The chip features 64 GB of on-package HBM2E memory. System bus interfaces include PCI-Express 5.0 x16 with CXL, and eight lanes of a proprietary interconnect called B-Link, which total 2.3 TB/s of bandwidth. The processor supports nearly all popular compute formats except double-precision floating-point, or FP64. Among the supported ones are single-precision or FP32, TF32+, FP16, BF16, INT16, and INT8. BIREN claims up to 256 TFLOP/s FP32, up to 512 TFLOP/s TF32+, up to 1 PFLOP/s BF16, and 2,048 TOPS INT8. This would put it at 2.4 to 2.8 times faster than NVIDIA's "Ampere" A100.