SAPEON, an artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor company, announced on the 13th that it demonstrated its AI processing speed and efficiency at the recent global AI semiconductor performance test competition (benchmark) 'MLPerf'. SAPEON's first commercialized AI semiconductor chip 'X220' recorded processing speeds that were 2.3 times faster than Nvidia's latest graphics processing unit (GPU) 'A2'.
SAPEON was also acknowledged for its power efficiency performance. The X220 also showed 2.2 times higher efficiency than A2 in terms of performance-per-watt consumption.
SAPEON X220 is a product released in 2020 that uses a 28-nano process instead of a front-end process, for price competitiveness. Its efficiency was not inferior to even the latest competitive products that use micro-processes of 7nm or less.
SAPEON conducted an 'Inference: Datacenter' benchmark, which measures the performance of high-performance AI services in data centers. It was the first Korean company to have its results published in that area.
SAPEON also registered an 'Available' grade, which is the commercialization step in the benchmark, for the first time in Korea. It succeeded in verifying the product's maturity, that includes not only hardware but also software. Domestic AI semiconductors have remained at the 'Preview' or 'RDI' grade, which is the research or prototype stage.
SAPEON is a project that was initiated by SK Telecom to improve AI infrastructure. It was used for the AI speaker 'NUGU', the intelligent video security solution 'T-view', and the AI-based media quality improvement solution 'Supernova', etc.
SAPEON established an independent corporation this year. This was to challenge the global AI semiconductor market using its accumulated technologies. SAPEON will actively push ahead with external businesses based on the results of the MLPerf in its commercialization portfolio.
Soo-jung Ryu, CEO of SAPEON, said, “The X220, which has proven its competitiveness through internal commercialization, was acknowledged for its excellent performance in the benchmark and garnered attention in the global market,” adding, “We will create a gap with our competitors with the next-generation X330 chip with improved performance, in the second half of next year.”
By staff reporter Yoon-sub Song (sys@etnews.com)