Chinese company Orient Silicon unveils world's first high-compute 3D AI chip in Shanghai

Shanghai Orient Computing Core Technology Co., Ltd. on Monday unveiled the DF1000, a high-performance 3D artificial intelligence (AI) chip developed on a fully domestic supply chain.

The DF1000 series is a software-defined, near-memory computing 3D AI chip designed to deliver high computing performance for AI applications.

According to the company, one of the chip's key technologies is its software-defined architecture, which combines spatial parallelism in task processing with time-division multiplexing of hardware resources to improve hardware utilization while reducing dependence on advanced semiconductor manufacturing processes.

The company said the DF1000 is capable of delivering computing performance of up to 520 tera floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in BF16 precision.

To address the "memory wall" challenge faced by conventional AI chips, the DF1000 adopts 3D hybrid bonding technology and wafer-level stacking to expand memory capacity. Its high-density input/output (I/O) design provides memory bandwidth of 6.4 terabytes per second (TB/s) and scale-up interconnect bandwidth of 900 gigabytes per second (GB/s), according to the company.

Guo Wei, vice president of Orient Computing, said the company plans to launch the next-generation DF2000 in the fourth quarter of 2026, followed by the DF3000 in the fourth quarter of 2027.

(Cover via VCG)