China’s local GPU company announces three new products.

Founded in October 2020 in Haidian, Beijing, China, the 80-employee company Moore Threads has introduced three AIBs—the MTT S10, MTT S2000, and just recently, the MTT S60 gaming AIB. The company had announced at their formation that they would be bringing out a series of GPUs for AI and gaming. And true to their word, they have just announced a PC gaming AIB, the MTT S60. The general specifications are shown in the following chart translated from the slide in Chinese shown at the announcement in Beijing last week (and is not an April Fools’ Day joke).

Along with the announcement, founder and CEO Zhang Jianzhong made his first official public appearance. Jianzhong is Nvidia’s former global vice president and general manager in China with 15 years of experience and support from partners like Lenovo and Tencent. Jianzhong has bragged that his company had received two billion yuan (at a $0.16 conversion rate, that is approximately $320 million USD) in two rounds of financing within 100 days of its establishment, making it one of the Chinese unicorn companies. Its investors include well-known technology companies such as ByteDance and Pony.ai.

Moore Threads has created a unified system architecture MUSA (MT Unified System Architecture).

The bottom layer is the full-featured GPU of Moore Threads, with four major engines: graphics, intelligent multimedia, AI, and physics. On top of this, there are various compilation tools and platforms, and support for OpenCL, SYCL, CUDA, Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL/GLES, and other mainstream programming interfaces, as well as various industry solutions for specific applications.

The Sudi GPU has four engines: a graphics rendering engine, an intelligent multimedia engine, an AI computing acceleration engine, and AlphaCore, a scientific computing and physical simulation engine.

The rendering engine is compatible with industry-standard APIs such as DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, and OpenGLES, as well as the two major game engines, and offers global illumination, spatial temporal antialiasing, physical rendering, soft shadows, reflections, and volumetric light.

The intelligent multimedia engine has traditional codec engines that operate in accordance with industry standards, but because the display industry is changing rapidly, and now 4K TVs have become popular, Jianzhong said that Sudi is the first GPU that supports 8K codec and AV1 codec, which can be used for video cloud, cloud conference, live broadcast, content creation, and 8K game applications.

The AI computing acceleration engine offers a set of end-to-end solutions to support different mainstream AI frameworks and provide various AI core services such as vision, voice, NLP, graphics AI, and chip AI.

AlphaCore is the company’s scientific computing and physical simulation engine: It can simulate various operating laws in computer graphics, and is integrated in different engines such as Unity, Houdini, and Unreal. AlphaCore, said Jianzhong, provides a variety of simulation tools to facilitate users as they perform high-precision physical simulation processing.

The MTT S60, which is based on Imagination Technologies’ GPU IP, has 2,048 MUSA cores built on TSMC’s 12-nm, single-precision floating-point computing capability up to 6 TFLOPS, supports 192Gpixels/s pixel fill rate. It has 8GB of LPGDDR4X video memory, and can drive 4K/8K ultra-high-definition displays. This AIB would be comparable to Nvidia’s GTX 1070, launched six years ago.

The S60 has video codec capabilities. There is hardware support for 8K H.264, H.265, AV1 encoding, as well as H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8, and VP9 decoding. Additionally, the AlphaCore physical engine can accelerate certain animation and rendering tools from popular suites like Unity, Houdini, and Unreal.

According to Jianzhong, this is the first domestic AIB that can play League of Legends games and supports all mainstream domestic PC operating systems.

MTT S60 is also the first GPU to support domestic industrial software Zhongwang 3D software.

At the same time, Moore Threads cooperated with D5 to use the rendering capabilities of MTT S60 to create a real-time 3D workflow, bringing an immersive creative experience; integrating AlphaCore with D5, it can also provide real-time simulation effects, simulating the effects of light and shadow in the physical world.

Moore Threads and domestic ecosystem partners have created a new alliance—PES Perfect Experience System Alliance. It is reported that the alliance includes almost all partners in the domestic PC industry. Jianzhong hopes to use Moore Threads’ GPU to empower applications in various industries.

MTT S60 is also used to help Taichi Graphics accelerate parallel computing of physics and graphics, empower graphics development enthusiasts, call the physics engine with one click, realize real-time physical effects rendering, and improve content production efficiency.

Moore Threads also cooperated with Glodon to build the first BIM/CIM acceleration system in China based on MTT S60 to help 3D visualization accelerate the workflow of architects, thereby driving digital twin construction.

Additionally, the company is cooperating with a number of domestic GIS service providers such as SuperMap Software, Sky Digital, and Zhongdi Digital, and says it is using MTT S60 to help real-time 3D innovation, perform 3D real-time rendering of geographic information, and use AI computing engines to accelerate the intelligence of GIS software.

Jianzhong said its first server product, the MTT S2000, based on Sudi, doubles the cores and has 32GB VRAM, and promises 12 TFLOPS, as well as offers mainstream AI frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, PaddlePaddle, OneFlow, and is compatible with x86 and Arm architecture CPUs.

Moore Threads announced it will launch a cloud desktop solution based on MTT  S2000 together with Ruijie Networks, Sangfor security, and H3C, which holds the second largest share in China’s server market.

Looking at cloud gaming, Moore Threads cooperates with Weiling Times to provide low-latency, low-power, and cost-effective cloud gaming solutions to achieve cross-platform, high-quality Android Cloud real-time gaming experience.

And says Jianzhong, Moore Threads also cooperates with Shengwang to support real-time interactive RTE technology and jointly build a narrowband high-definition video cloud infrastructure platform.

Jianzhong also announced Digitalme, a digital human end-to-end solution, including 3D reconstruction, voice reproduction, real-time rendering, intelligent perception, intelligent interaction, and other functions to solve the cumbersome process of digital human production. Its digital human production line spans the manufacture of digital human to real-time intelligent interaction.

The technical experts of Moore Threads further used this process to build a 3D face, clone the sound, and make a simple digital human demo.

There is no availability or pricing info yet. Moore Threads is expected to ship the first test boards in just a few months to Chinese OEMs.

What do we think?

Armed with box full of cash, a pretty good pool of talent, and gigundness domestic PAM, Jianzhong is really going to have screw up badly or get on the wrong side of his Communist overlords to not succeed. You’ll know when the company is in trouble when you read about them seeking business in international markets. That will signal a failure to meet the needs of its Communist brethren company’s need in either performance, price, or availability.