News Graphcore reportedly explores sale: Arm, OpenAI, and Softbank named as rumored potential buyers

[Admin]

AI processor designer Graphcore could be acquired by Arm, OpenAI, or Softbank.

Graphcore reportedly explores sale: Arm, OpenAI, and Softbank named as rumored potential buyers : Read more

 

[TechLurker]

There would be certain humor in another UK company being effectively bought by Softbank, as well as humor in being bought by Arm, which is also a property of Softbank.

Maybe the UK can work out a joint deal with Softbank to retain a degree of controlling stake, but I doubt the UK can afford to do so and will still likely lose control regardless.

 

[bit_user]

Each GC200 IPU packs 1,472 independent IPU cores with SMT that can handle 8,832 separate parallel threads and carries 900 MB of SRAM with an aggregated bandwidth of 47.5 TB/s per chip (eliminating need for external memory) as well as 10 IPU links to scale-out with other GC200 chips.

Ah, thanks for reminding me who that was! I saw the Hot Chips talk, but forgot the "900 MB of SRAM" was from GraphCore. IIRC, that chip was made on TSMC N7, and supposedly devoted more than 50% of its die space to SRAM (or maybe that's yet another Hot Chips presentation I'm remembering?)

Anyway, here's the presentation from Hot Chips 2021:

https://hc33.hotchips.org/assets/program/conference/day2/HC2021.Graphcore.SimonKnowles.v04.pdf
​

While it's key to have lots of on-die SRAM, it really won't help with very large models, if you don't also have a decent amount of DRAM bandwidth. That could be where they had issues.

 

[bit_user]

There would be certain humor in another UK company being effectively bought by Softbank, as well as humor in being bought by Arm, which is also a property of Softbank.

IIRC, Softbank snapped up ARM in 2016, after the Pound plummeted in the wake of a certain referendum. I wonder if British assets are still trading at a discount...

 

[whatinthehardware]

Given the lead investors Microsoft and Sequioa wrote off their Graphcore investment I would say it should be picked up wholesale. Whether the owners now try to claim it is now magically worth a lot more because of the LLM hype cycle and NVIDIA stock surge (which Graphcore couldn't compete with) it will be interesting to see what happens here given Graphcore have a new chip being released soon.

Retail investors buying up a stock in a frenzy is one thing but large companies and PE firms throwing billions at this hype cycle to try and invade NVIDIAs moat is another.

 

[bit_user]

to try and invade NVIDIAs moat is another.

Not a moat, but a swamp! Both Lisa Su and Jim Keller have said so.
: )

 

[whatinthehardware]

Indeed, which is why I find the ARM acquisition unlikely and the OpenAI one dubious. Softbank will throw money at anything though and will have plenty of cash if they sell even a small portion of their ARM stock next month. There's plenty of dumb ideas to throw a few billion at this year and they're just the guys for it.