On February 7, ZTE announced its 2021 annual report, predicting a substantial increase of more than 53% in profit, with net profit attributable to shareholders of the listed company exceeding 6.5 billion. ZTE has once again entered rapid growth after suffering huge losses in 2018, which reminds people of the US sanctions against ZTE in 2018. The sanctions caused the company to fall into huge losses, and its stock price fell by the limit for eight consecutive times. Even the management at the time was asked to resign en masse. Among them, Mr. Zhao Xianming, who served as ZTE chairman and president, left and founded Beijing Hongshan Information Technology Research Institute Co., Ltd.
Zhao Xianming graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology majoring in communications and electronic systems and received a doctorate in engineering. In 1998, he joined ZTE Corporation to engage in R&D and management of CDMA products; in 2004, he served as Senior Vice President of ZTE Corporation; from January 2014 to December 2015, he served as ZTE’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He is also responsible for the company's strategy, platform, and various system product operation departments; from November 2015 to March 2016, he was an executive director of ZTE. In April 2016, he served as CEO and Chairman of ZTE Corporation.
After the establishment of Hongshan Research Institute, it quickly attracted investors from various institutions such as Yizhuang State Investment, Beijing State Management, Legend Capital, and Yunhui Capital. The products made by Hongshan Why can we attract investment from these institutions?
According to public information, Beijing Hongshan Microelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Hongshan Microelectronics) was established in April 2019 to develop and design large co-processor chips. (GPGPU) is the core business. At present, Hongshan Microelectronics has achieved mass production of two GPGPUs on the 7nm advanced process. Each model supports 64-bit double-precision floating point operations and is compatible with x86 CPU architecture systems. Therefore, it can be widely used in artificial intelligence (AI), various scientific research and industrial simulation calculations, etc. Hongshan Microelectronics will be committed to the development and iteration of this type of Many Core Processor general-purpose co-processor, constantly challenging more advanced processes, and contributing to the digital and intelligent future of all mankind.
According to the predictions of the 2020 Academy of Information and Communications Technology white paper, human use of data will increase 40 times in 2035 compared with 2020. With the development of high-speed transmission technologies such as 5G and future 6G, the digitalization process of mankind will be more deeply rooted in the advancement of cloud technology. High-performance computing and artificial intelligence are inseparable from the core computing power of GPGPU deployed in the cloud. As of the publication date of this article, the market value of international leading companies in the GPGPU design field like Hongshan Microelectronics has reached 4.3 trillion yuan, marking the market's great affirmation of the development of GPGPU. Hongshan Microelectronics plans to launch the next-generation GPGPU with a 5-nanometer advanced process in 2022. It plans to further strengthen the tensor computing (Tensor) area and promote artificial intelligence into the 2.0 era. This will improve my country's independent and controllable high-performance general-purpose R&D and iteration of type chips.
The "Hongshan SC3" chip is the flagship product launched in 2021 by Hongshan Microelectronics' outstanding chip design engineers from around the world to pursue ultra-high performance and optimal energy efficiency. Based on the design concept, the excellent performance of 19.28 TFlops of 64-bit double-precision floating point is achieved through a higher degree of parallelization architecture. At the beginning of mass production in August 2021, it has been recognized by many leading companies in multiple industries, including genetic engineering, biopharmaceuticals, and smart cars. Especially through deepening industry applications, the adaptation of genetic information analysis based on this coprocessor has been completed, realizing the domestic replacement of GATK (Genomic Analysis Tool Kit) in the field of high-throughput genetic analysis, and achieving more than twice the calculation performance, surpassing it in multiple dimensions with lower energy consumption and higher precision.
On December 12, 2021, the second GPGPU "Hongshan SC3s", which is also made of 7nm advanced process, was successfully tape-out. The chip is designed with the ultimate cost-effectiveness Concept; it is expected to occupy many application scenarios including personal workstations with extremely strong divisibility and extremely high energy efficiency advantages. As of the date of publication, Hongshan Microelectronics has received futures intention orders of up to 50,000 pieces under the condition of "zero" sales.
In addition, in the development of heterogeneous parallel computing platforms such as GPUs, Hongshan Microelectronics has inherited an application ecosystem based on OpenCL iterations for many years; it is in sync with the mainstream parallel processing ecosystem in the market. Developed and iterated to this day, it is a rare portable and scalable parallel computing ecosystem in the industry.
At present, most applications have been successfully implemented in the fields of heterogeneous cloud computing, real-time information processing, AI neural network platform "Chainer", fluid mechanics platform "OpenFoam", protein AI prediction models, and biological information processing.
Let us wait and see whether Hongshan can carry the banner of domestic GPGPU.