Part of the world of hardware lives pending what AMD and NVIDIA are going to launch in a few months on the market, and that is that hopes are focused more on the two architectures of the giants than on the products themselves. Although there will be improvements, the main leap will be TSMC’s 5nm node, basically because of its density, and this is where AMD and NVIDIA have become competitors because China has just presented the first GPU with said lithographic process.
It is not that China does not have competing companies with the two giants, not at all, it is rather the opposite. But one of them seems to be doing a better job than the rest. Innosilicon showed off its two new GPUs with somewhat poor performance for 2021 and now MetaX takes over with a graphics card of which, curiously, he has not given too many details other than to talk a little about the chip, which promises to be top.
The first 5nm GPU is from China
There is a lot of curtain in front of the stage and we can only hear the background music provided by the company. MetaX is the most radical company in China when it comes to GPUs and is a real threat against NVIDIA and AMD.
What they report is the preview of an undated presentation where it has been said that the company will bring high-performance general-purpose GPU chips even with heterogeneous architecture, that is, MCM. And it will do so hand in hand with TSMC with its new high-performance lithographic process N5P with SoIC 3D (in theory they will not use SoIC 2.5D) and a performance that is said to be compatible with the conventional system in terms of software (DX 12 Ultimate?).
In the words of its co-founder and chief marketing officer:
This MetaX GPU adopts a self-design architecture together with an instruction set, and adopts a reconfigurable parallel computing architecture that can break the performance bottleneck of traditional GPUs to achieve world-class GPU computing performance.
As if that were not enough, the company also releases an interesting fact, since they have commented that its chip’s high-speed memory reading and writing capabilities are comparable to the best designs and levels in the world.
On par with NVIDIA and AMD, but against which chips?
We do not know the performance of this new chip that does not have a name at the moment, everything is carried out with great caution, but MetaX has left clear messages of what we can expect. And it is that in terms of performance, operation and consumption they will be on a par with the best chips in the world.
But they have gone a little further in their statements:
MetaX supports chip-level virtualization on your GPU, interconnection of multiple GPUs on a single machine, interconnection of multi-system GPU clusters, and other technologies that can greatly expand the application of GPUs in computing-intensive scenarios such as AI and scientific computing.
It seems that we will indeed be facing a 5nm GPU that will be competitive. The dilemma is that since the company does not compare directly with specific graphics chips, we do not know if it refers to the next Navi 31 and AD102 or you are comparing them with the current Navi 21 and GA102, where in that case it would be a bit disappointing considering the statements.
We will have to wait for them to show specific data and present said chip in great detail.
