Esperanto Technologies and Rapidus Partner to Enable More Energy-Efficient Designs for the Coming “Post GPU Era”
Data center customers will benefit from access to high-performance silicon solutions that
consume less power for AI inference and HPC computing applications
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., May 15, 2024 – Esperanto Technologies™, the leading developer of high-performance, energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions based on the RISC-V instruction set, today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Cooperation with Rapidus, a new Japanese company that is a burgeoning leader in advanced 2nm semiconductor manufacturing with a strong focus on enabling faster time-to-market (TTM). The initial focus of the partnership is to enable future semiconductor designers to develop more energy efficient solutions for AI inference & HPC workloads for data center and enterprise edge applications. This will help alleviate what many are beginning to call an unsustainable growth in energy consumption by data centers globally, due in part to the increasing power required by many of today’s AI and HPC chips.
In their recent report “Electricity 2024,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated, “Data centers are significant drivers of the growth in electricity demand. After globally consuming an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022, data centers’ total electricity consumption could reach more than 1,000 TWh in 2026. This demand is roughly equivalent to the entire electricity consumption of Japan. Updated regulations and technological improvements, including energy efficiency, will be crucial to moderate the surge in energy consumption from data centers.”
Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, a leading independent research and analyst firm, said, “CPUs and GPUs have played a key role in fostering the boom in the artificial intelligence market. However, the increasing power consumption of the latest chips is contributing to a near-term crisis. For example, energy consumed by Generative AI processing is projected to reflect close to 80 percent of all power used in U.S. data centers by 2027. Clearly, a new industry approach is required.”
Rapidus began construction of IIM (Innovative Integration for Manufacturing) in Chitose City, Hokkaido, Japan in September 2023. This will be that country’s first silicon foundry to produce state-of-the-art logic semiconductors at the 2 nanometer process node and beyond, due in part to its close partnership with IBM’s Albany Nanotech Complex in New York. Rapidus plans to start operation of a pilot production line at IIM-1 (the first fab) in April 2025, and begin mass production in 2027.
“Rapidus represents a new approach to leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing, and we are very impressed with the direction and speed at which they are operating,” said Art Swift, president and CEO of Esperanto Technologies. “The strategic partnership with Rapidus plays a key role in our expansion plans, particularly in Japan. Along with our other partners there, we hope our new relationship will extend the benefits of our energy efficient technology to a broader set of AI chip designers in the future.”
“As part of our corporate philosophy, we will commit ourselves to further innovating toward a truly green society,” said Dr. Atsuyoshi Koike, president and CEO of Rapidus Corporation. “As we enter the age of full-fledged AI, it is imperative to design and manufacture semiconductors with superior energy-saving performance, and we believe that this collaboration with Esperanto is a major step toward solving this issue.”
About Esperanto Technologies
Esperanto Technologies Inc. delivers massively parallel, high-performance, energy-efficient computing solutions that offer a compelling choice for the most demanding Generative AI and non-AI applications. The changing, computationally intensive workloads of the machine learning era mandate a new clean-sheet solution, shedding the baggage of existing legacy architectures, and the programmability limitations of overspecialized hardware. Esperanto leverages the simple, elegant, open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) to deliver flexibility, scalability, performance and energy-efficiency advantages. For more information, please visit https://www.dev.esperanto.ai/
About Rapidus
Rapidus Corporation aims to develop and manufacture the world’s most advanced logic semiconductors. By developing and providing services to shorten cycle times for design, wafer processes, 3D packaging, and other aspects of semiconductor production, Rapidus creates new industries together with customers. We continue to embrace challenges that contribute to the fulfillment, prosperity, and happiness of people’s lives using semiconductors.
Esperanto Technologies Introduces First Generative AI Appliance Based on RISC-V, Enabling Developers to Easily Create and Deploy Purpose-Built Vertical Applications
Enables Fast and Secure Deployment of Fine-Tuned Business Applications
Including Summarization, Coding, Query and Image Generation
Based on the Latest Open-Source Generative AI Models
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., September 12, 2023 – Esperanto Technologies™, the leading developer of high-performance, energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions based on the RISC-V instruction set, today announced the industry’s first Generative AI Appliance based on RISC-V technology. Esperanto’s Data Science team contributed heavily to its design, targeting customers wanting to develop and deploy business applications quickly using the latest open-source Generative AI foundation models. Esperanto’s Generative AI Appliance is an integrated software/hardware solution that can be installed in private datacenters or at the enterprise edge using an industry-standard server form factor. Because it is preloaded and self-contained, it delivers high levels of data privacy and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while eliminating the need for developers to constantly download, port and tune the latest Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models to expensive GPU-based hardware.
Esperanto’s new appliance is ideal for organizations that want to leverage the benefits of Generative AI technology to create custom applications initially around information summarization, organizational data/knowledge query, computer code generation and translation and image generation. Esperanto’s Data Science and Software teams designed it to support various application UI and output texts, computer programs and images, and is continually expanding the availability of LLMs and Diffusion models as they are made public. Examples of industries that can benefit from Esperanto’s new solution include the healthcare and legal professions which require quick and accurate summaries of complex descriptions while maintaining data privacy, and the financial industry which can translate its legacy code base to more modern and maintainable programming languages.
To request additional details and pricing, please visit www.esperanto.ai/contact.
“Generative AI is revolutionizing the way we create and summarize content, generate and translate computer code, and generate visual and video content. However, creating and deploying LLM-based applications typically requires large teams of data scientists, long development times and expensive, hard-to-obtain GPU-based platforms. This can make Generative AI strategies impractical for most organizations today,” said Art Swift, president and CEO at Esperanto Technologies. “Esperanto recognizes these challenges and has developed its new Generative AI Appliance based on its advanced RISC-V hardware using pretrained LLMs that are highly accurate but with much faster development and strong data privacy.”
Esperanto’s Generative AI Appliance is currently running the latest LLMs and image generation models such as LLaMA 2, Vicuna, StarCoder, OpenJourney and Stable Diffusion, and the company's strategy is to continuously update the system with the latest versions of popular open-source models as soon as they are released.
“We are in the early stages of a multi-year super cycle for merchant ASICs, driven by the adoption of Generative AI, an increase in AI training, significant growth of AI inferencing, and HPC workflows,” said Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strategies, Inc. “We are forecasting an Enterprise Edge infrastructure refresh as companies look to run more AI and HPC workloads on-prem for cost, privacy, and data sovereignty reasons. In addition, energy efficiency is a growing priority, so offerings like Esperanto’s that have a strong dollar-per-watt value are well positioned.”
“The market is trending toward smaller LLM and diffusion models – 30 billion parameters and below – driven by reducing the high cost of inference on very large models”, said Karl Freund, founder and principal analyst at Cambrian-AI Research. “These models are trained to be highly accurate with much lower training and inference costs. There is a lot of money to be made in this space, and inference solutions like Esperanto’s Generative AI Appliance should save customers significant costs versus GPU-based systems.”
Esperanto’s Generative AI Appliance is available now and includes currently available ET-SoC-1 AI Accelerator chips that can run up to 4 LLMs simultaneously. The appliance is delivered in a standard 2U-high rack-mounted chassis and is available directly from Esperanto.
To request additional details and pricing, please visit www.esperanto.ai/contact.
About Esperanto Technologies:
Esperanto Technologies develops massively parallel, high-performance, energy-efficient computing solutions for Generative AI, other AI, and massively parallel HPC workloads, based on the open standard RISC-V instruction set architecture. Esperanto is headquartered in Mountain View, California with additional engineering sites in Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; Barcelona, Spain; and Belgrade, Serbia. For more information, please visit https://www.dev.esperanto.ai/