Alibaba unveils hyper-fast AI inference chip

Alibaba Group launched its first high-performance AI inference chip, Hanguang 800, at the ongoing 2019 Apsara Conference held in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province. Developed by Alibaba's chip subsidiary Pingtouge Semiconductor, the chip, a neural processing unit, has a computing power 10 times of that of traditional graphic processing units. It can handle more than 78,500 pictures in a second. Hanguang 800 is expected to significantly enhance Alibaba's computational efficiency in visual search and other applications such as the "city brain," said Jeff Zhang, the group CTO and head of the Alibaba Damo Academy.