Alibaba unveils Hanguang 800 AI inference chip to speed-up ML tasks
First AI inference chip has been introduced by Alibaba Group called ‘Hanguang 800’ which performs machine-learning tasks efficiently and quickly.The Hanguang 800 will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers at a later stage. The neural processing unit is already being used to power features on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, including product search and personalised recommendations.
As per Alibaba, its ecommerce website Taobao previously took an hour to categorise one billion product images that are uploaded to the site each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalised recommendations. However, with the Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to finish the task in just five minutes.
‘Hanguang 800 is a pursuit of next-generation technologies, boosting computing capabilities that will drive both our current and emerging businesses while improving energy-efficiency said by Alibaba Group CTO Jeff Zhang.
He continued to say that, in the near future, we plan to empower our clients by providing access through our cloud business to the advanced computing that is made possible by the chip, anytime and anywhere.
Apart from this, the chip is also used for automatic translation on its e-commerce sites, advertising, and intelligent customer services. It is believed that chip would help Chinese companies to reduce their dependence on American technology, as the trade war makes business collaborations between the two countries more and more difficult.
The company has not revealed any details on the availability of the chip so far.
