Canaan Technology: The third RISC-V chip K230 is coming soon

Recently, at the second Dishui Lake China RISC-V Industry Forum, Tang Weiwei, vice president of Canaan Technology, introduced the current situation of Canaan Technology and the company’s latest launch of the third AI chip K230 series.

Tang Weiwei said that Canaan Technology delivered the world's first 7nm ASIC chip in terms of "blockchain" chips; in terms of artificial intelligence, it was the first to deliver RISC-V AI chips in 2018, with shipments exceeding two million pieces. . Canaan Technology adheres to the spirit of open source and openness in RISC-V, and has gained tens of thousands of developers at home and abroad, as well as more than 100 third-party development boards, core boards, modules, modules and other open source hardware, GitHub open source projects More than 650.

Canaan Technology has launched a series of Kendryte series AI SoCs around AI products, which are used in consumer AIoT, vertical industry IoT and edge computing. The first-generation K210 is a dual-core RISC-V AIoT chip with small computing power, while the second-generation K510 is a large chip with 2T AI computing power. The upcoming K230 is a significant improvement on the industry's K210.

K230’s “Two Highs and Two Mores”

Talking about the specific characteristics of K230, Tang Weiwei summarized it as two highs and two mores, where the two highs refer to high performance and high computing power utilization, and the two mores refer to AI multi-modality and AI tool diversity.

Higher performance: The K230's CPU is a high-performance processing platform launched by Canaan and Pingtou Ge through in-depth cooperation with the dual-core "Xuantie C908", especially for vector processing. It allows the CPU to work closely with Canaan’s self-developed third-generation AI KPU engine.

Higher computing power utilization: Due to the tight coupling of CPU and KPU, the MAC utilization rate of some typical networks exceeds 70%.

Multimodality corresponds to more AI computing models such as vision, speech, and translation. The diversity of tools means that K230 has complete operators, hundreds of algorithms are open source, and it also provides easy-to-deploy tools for customers.

Tang Weiwei said that as the types of sensors become more and more abundant, the types of data are also increasing, so the AI ​​multi-modality of K230 is very suitable for sensor fusion scenarios including smart homes, assisted driving, robots, intelligent education, etc.

In addition to the CPU, this product also has a built-in DPU for full HD 3D depth engine, and a 4K HD VPU. Due to the introduction of the medium/near 3D depth engine, it can support medium-distance scenes including face-swiping door locks, face-swiping payment, etc.