Update: China may Win in AI Computing

By _MonolithIC 3D

May 24, 2023

Shortly after ISSCC 2022, we were intrigued by Alibaba's presentation of a paper titled "184QPS/W 64Mb/mm2 3D Logic-to-DRAM Hybrid Bonding with Process-Near-Memory Engine for Recommendation. System." The paper claimed a remarkable improvement of over 1,000 times in AI computing. Promptly, we published a blog about this breakthrough titled “China May Win in AI Computing”. However, we could not find any indication of Alibaba's revolutionary technology being adopted in the English electronics media until we stumbled upon Techinsights' advertisements for the Jasminer device teardown. Subsequently, we conducted a follow-up study of Chinese electronics media using Google Translate and uncovered numerous other activities by Chinese semiconductor vendors. It is well-known that the US restrictions on state-of-the-art semiconductor equipment and computing chips have significantly impacted China's competitive position in the field of AI. Nevertheless, it seems that certain Chinese companies are now exploring alternative approaches, such as Hybrid Bonding, as evidenced by the coverage below.

Let's start with a bit of a background. In a paper presented at the 2017 IEEE S3S conference, titled "A 1,000x Improvement in Computer Systems by Bridging the Processor-Memory Gap," we introduced the potential of using hybrid bonding to overcome the "Memory Wall." We further elaborated on this concept in a book chapter, titled "A 1000× Improvement of the Processor-Memory Gap," published in the book NANO-CHIPS 2030,published in 2020.

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