South Korea’s Nvidia wannabe, AI chip start-up Rebellions, to begin mass production of NPUs, backed by Samsung

A version of this article was first published by The Korea Times in a partnership with the South China Morning Post.

In an office building in southern Seoul, a dozen chips were laid side by side on shelves, each next to their own electric fan to cool them down as they operate.

Regarded as the next generation of AI chips, NPUs are optimised to perform so-called simultaneous matrix operations, which give them a step up in the AI method known as deep learning, compared with general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs.

Rebellions, a fabless AI chip company co-founded by five South Korean engineers in 2020, has been viewed as the country’s best hope to rival Nvidia in AI inference – the process of running live data through an AI model to make a prediction or solve a task, as opposed to training.

Park Sung-hyun, CEO and co-founder of Rebellions, said in a recent interview with The Korea Times that Atom is set to be mass-produced with Samsung Electronics’ 5-nanometre technology in the first half of this year.

That will be an important milestone for the South Korean chip industry, as Atom will be the first domestically developed, mass-produced chip to support language models: AI models trained to mimic natural language.

“We are much more energy-efficient than Nvidia’s GPUs in AI inference,” said Park. Atom is up to five times more power-efficient than Nvidia’s A100, but in a language model inference benchmark test, Atom’s latency – a measure of the speed of performance of chips – was just half of Nvidia’s A2, according to Park.

In practice, that means the Atom chips can be cooled down by only fans, while Nvidia chips need to operate in air-conditioned rooms that consume more electricity and entail higher operating costs.

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