SK Telecom launches data center AI chip

SK Telecom on Wednesday its self-developed data center artificial intelligence (AI) chip called Sapeon X220.

The carrier claimed the chip had better performance and was cheaper compared to existing GPU. Sapeon X220 had 1.5 time faster deep learning calculation time. Thanks to this, when applied to data centers, it can process 1.5 times more data. 

The chip was half the price and its power consumption rate was 80% of GPUs, the carrier said. 

According to SK Telecom, Sapeon X220 had a performance of 6.7KFPS, meaning it can process 6,700 images per second. It consumed 60W of power.

The chip interference capability stood at 100TeraOPS (operations per second). It doesn’t have training capability.

Last year, Huawei unveiled its own AI chip called Ascend 310 which consumed 8W power, had 16TOPS interference capabilities and 8TeraFLOPS(floating point operations per second).

SK Telecom contracted the production of Sapeon X220 to TSMC. The carrier said it was collaborating with SK Hynix in the development of AI chip. Core architecture  to improve operation speed and memory were two important factors for an AI chip, SK Telecom said, and its collaboration with SK Hynix will bring great synergy.

The unveiling was held at a government event attended by South Korea President Moon Jae-in, who said the country will invest 1 trillion won into AI semiconductors by 2029.