Tencent chip made public for the first time: the three "cores" of Zixiao, Canghai, and Xuanling are progressing, and BAT gathers on the Internet to make cores!
Tencent chip
On November 3, at the 2021 Tencent Digital Ecology Conference, Tang Daosheng, senior executive vice president of Tencent and CEO of the cloud and smart industry business group, made public the core plan of Tencent for the first time and announced substantial progress in the three major business directions. They are:
Zixiao for AI computing;
Facing the sea of video processing;
Xuanling for high-performance networks.
Tang Daosheng, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and CEO of Cloud and Smart Industry Group
(Source: 2021 Tencent Digital Ecological Conference)
Tang Daosheng said: “The chip is the core part of the hardware and the core infrastructure of the industrial Internet. Tencent will continue to actively explore and make long-term investment. Tencent will also always seek to cooperate with domestic and foreign countries through the model of ecological co-construction. Chip companies maintain in-depth strategic cooperation and combine chip customization capabilities with software customization capabilities to obtain the best performance and the best price/performance ratio."
About Zixiao, Canghai and Xuanling
In the past two years, domestic AI computing chips have developed rapidly. Whether it is CPU, GPU or ASIC, all products are available, and all of them have good performance. This allows AI to empower traditional industries to get rid of international manufacturers’ chips. rely. In the future, the focus of the development of domestic AI chips is the innovation of the architecture, which will further improve the algorithm operation efficiency of AI chips. According to reports, Tencent Zixiao AI reasoning chip has been optimized for the architecture, adding innovative measures such as computer vision CV accelerator and video codec accelerator inside the chip, and encapsulating HBM2e memory and AI core by using 2.5D packaging technology to break AI The "memory wall" of the chip, and to improve the computing efficiency of the chip, is mainly oriented to scenes such as picture and video processing, natural language processing, and search recommendation.
According to reports, the current Zixiao AI reasoning chip has been successfully taped out and successfully lit, and its performance has doubled compared with similar products in the industry.
Tencent Canghai transcoding chips are mainly used in the field of video processing. The purpose of video processing is to enhance the viewability of the video. Processing methods include image capture, 3D noise reduction, and DVI enhancement. The Canghai transcoding chip algorithmically implements all mainstream coding tools such as high-precision motion search, full-rate-distortion optimization, and efficient adaptive quantization, and incorporates Tencent Cloud software encoder rate control technologies.
Many people may not understand Tencent Cloud’s video processing capabilities. Last year, Tencent Cloud launched the H265 hardware encoder Yaochi V500. As Tencent Cloud’s first self-developed H265 hardware encoder, Yaochi V500 can fully meet the low latency and high throughput of cloud games. In the case of the same image quality, the bandwidth occupancy can be reduced by 15%, and under the same bandwidth condition, the image quality can be greatly improved.
In addition, the Canghai transcoding chip can meet the requirements of high throughput, low latency, and real-time business through technologies such as multi-core extended architecture, high-performance encoding pipeline, and hierarchical memory layout. This is essential for video transmission and presentation in the 5G era. 5G provides network support for the intelligent, high-definition and real-time video industry. The compression rate of Canghai’s transcoding chip is increased by more than 30% compared with the industry. The terminal makes the transmitted video more perfect reproduction.
The third chip development announced by Tencent is the intelligent network card chip Xuanling, which has a performance increase of 4 times compared with competing products. The concept of smart network card is proposed to solve the shortcomings of traditional CPU in processing network transmission tasks. To be precise, it breaks through the limitation of CPU and realizes high speed and large bandwidth with the help of computing units such as FPGA, ASIC, GPU and NPU. Tencent's smart network card chip Xuanling is committed to the performance acceleration of cloud hosts, moving down the virtualization, network/storage IO and other functions that originally run on the main CPU to the chip, realizing zero occupancy of the main CPU.
Tencent has already begun to make cores
In recent years, we have seen too many cross-border core manufacturing, car manufacturers cross-border core manufacturing, mobile phone manufacturers cross-border core manufacturing, Internet giants cross-border core manufacturing... For Tencent, although this is the first The progress was publicly disclosed this time, but it has already been deployed.
As early as November 2016, Tencent and Alibaba led the investment in programmable chip company Barefoot Networks. After that, in June 2019, Tencent made a follow-up investment in Suiyuan Technology's C round of financing, and the affiliated company became a major shareholder of Suiyuan Technology. Recently, Suiyuan Intelligent Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. was established and once again linked with Tencent.
Source: Enterprise Check
Tencent itself is also entering the field of semiconductor chips a little bit. On March 19, 2020, Tencent established Shenzhen Baoan Bay Tencent Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. with a registered capital of 20 million yuan and the legal representative is the vice president of Tencent Cloud. Wang Jingtian, the company's business scope includes integrated circuit design and research and development.
Source: Aiqicha
In terms of recruitment, it also revealed that Tencent is making cores. On July 16, job seekers noticed that Tencent posted a large number of recruitment information on its official website, recruiting professionals including chip design engineers and chip architecture engineers. Up to now, Tencent has released 37 chip-related job information on its official website, with work locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Wuhan.
Source: Tencent official website
Combining the contents of the 2021 Tencent Digital Ecology Conference and Tencent's business situation, analysts believe that Tencent's core-making plan will focus on Tencent's cloud business, in order to achieve a little bit of core hardware self-research in this field.
According to Tan Lewen, vice president of Tencent Cloud International, Tencent Cloud has supported its products from the beginning, such as QQ, WeChat, and game products. Now it has expanded to the mass market and enterprise market, with capabilities in computing, data storage, CRM, and data analysis. Comprehensive capabilities. According to "TheForrester New WaveTM: Function-As-A- Service Platforms, Q1 2020" released by Forrester, a global consulting and service organization, Tencent Cloud's FaaS capability ranks first in China and top three in the world.
At the 2021 Tencent Digital Ecology Conference, Tencent not only disclosed its core-making progress, but also officially announced its distributed cloud strategy for the first time, and released the industry's first global governance cloud-native operating system Orca. Qiu Yuepeng, vice president of Tencent, COO of the cloud and smart industry business group, and president of Tencent Cloud, pointed out: “Tencent Cloud’s native operating system Achieves a single cluster that supports 100,000-level servers and one-million-level containers. The number of managed CPU cores exceeds 100 million. It has officially entered the billion-level era. On top of the powerful hardware infrastructure, Tencent Cloud will build ubiquitous cloud services through distributed clouds."
BAT officially gathers in the chip field
After Tencent revealed its own core making progress this time, it marked that all the top three BATs personally came to challenge the difficult field of "domestic core", rather than relying on investment to get involved in this industry.
According to official sources, Baidu has been laying out the AI chip field since 2011. In 2018, Baidu's self-developed "Kunlun Core 1" attracted widespread attention in the industry and deployed to Baidu's search engine, Xiaodu and other businesses. In 2019, Baidu released the far-field voice interaction chip "Honghu", which uses HiFi4 custom instruction set, dual-core DSP core, and average power consumption of only 100mW. On August 18, 2021, Robin Li personally released "Kunlun Core 2" at the Baidu World Conference. It adopts the self-developed second-generation XPU architecture. Compared with the first-generation, the performance is improved by 2-3 times, and the INT8 computing power reaches 256 TeraOPS. FP16 has a computing power of 128 TeraFLOPS, and its maximum power consumption is only 120W.
Alibaba announced that its own core manufacturing started with Hanguang 800. The chip released at the 2019 Yunqi Conference has powerful computing power and can process 78,000 images per second. In the industry-standard ResNet-50 test, Hanguang 800 inference performance reached 78563 IPS, which was 4 times higher than the industry's best AI chip Habana Goya at the time. At present, Alibaba Pingtou has four major chip series, namely Xuantie processor IP, Yitian processor, Hanguang artificial intelligence chip and Yuzhen RFID chip.
Now, Tencent will also have its own chip series for AI computing, video processing, and high-performance networking. Once China's three Internet giants BAT officially completed the gathering in the chip industry, which undoubtedly better reflects the general trend of "domestic cores".
