How Biren got TSMC to ban its own AI chips!

TSMC stopped making AI chips for China's Biren Technology, and it was Biren's own fault!

TSMC stops making Biren AI chips due to US sanctions

TSMC – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company – has suspended production of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips for China’s Biren Technology.

TSMC was forced to make this decision after publicly available information revealed that the Biren BR100 and BR104 chips outperformed the NVIDIA A100 chip, which was used as Basis of US sanctions.

While TSMC has not reached a conclusion on whether the high-end Biren BR100 or the slower BR104 meet or exceed US Government Threshold Due to the restrictions of advanced AI chip technology, it has decided to stop the production and supply of Biren chips for now.

In order for TSMC to continue producing BR100 or BR104 chips, Biren must now prove that its chips do not offer “Peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O throughput equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to (NVIDIA) A100“or obtain an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

And believe it or not, it was Biren Technology that created this mess!

How Biren ruined its own BR100 AI chips

Biren, one of China's most promising semiconductor design companies, previously said its artificial intelligence chips produced by TSMC were not covered by the latest US export restrictions.

However, its own website touts the BR100 chip family as offering “world class performance“, and has “Improved by more than 3X” compared to its main rivals.

In addition to that, Biren launched a Press release on September 9, 2022, declaring that the Slower MLPerf proved that BR104 outperforms NVIDIA A100!

The statement came less than two weeks after the US government ordered AMD and NVIDIA to… stop exporting Its shipment of MI250, A100 and faster AI chips to China is either a display of incredible gall or a combination of arrogance and idiocy.

Either way, the US government took notice and TSMC came under pressure to comply with US export restrictions. Great PR, but a stupid decision, Biren…

Take a look at the benchmark results that Biren himself published and which show that Slower The BR104 chip was between 27% and 58% faster than the NVIDIA A100.

With these results, the BR104 would certainly make the list of the latest models. Restrictions on the export of American technologyNot surprisingly, TSMC quickly stopped manufacturing and supplying Biren BR100 series chips.

As powerful as the BR100 and BR104 GPGPU chips are, they are now on the way out as TSMC will no longer manufacture them and Biren Technology has no plausible alternatives for 7nm manufacturing.

Read more : US hits out at Chinese military with new chip export ban!

Biren BR100 artificial intelligence chips that TSMC stopped producing

The Biren BR100 and the slower BR104 are general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) chips, which are geared toward artificial intelligence applications.

Both are manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm process technology and utilize 2.5D chipset and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) packaging technologies to achieve high performance and high throughput.

The Biren BR100 GPGPU chip family supports up to eight independent virtual instances (SVIs), each physically isolated with its own hardware resources, for increased security.

Their chips are designed with a proprietary Blink high-speed GPU interconnect bus that delivers bandwidth of up to 448 GB/s, with the ability to connect up to 8 cards in a single node, using the latest generation PCI Express 5.0.

Biren Technology offers two products based on BR100: the Bili 100P OCP accelerator module (OAM) and the Bill 104P PCI Express accelerator card.

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