Biren Technology, IDG, and ByteDance Invest in YunSilicon
Recently, China’s high-end GPU chip maker Biren Technology and IDG Capital and ByteDance jointly invested in the angel round of Shanghai-based YunSilicon, a Chinese Data Processing Unit (DPU) start-up.
DPU is a newly developed special processor after CPUs and GPUs. DPUs are able to deal with the network, storage and security tasks traditionally undertaken by CPUs, reduce the operating cost of data center, and connect with GPUs at higher speeds for better computing performance and clustering capabilities.
Founded in May 2021, YunSilicon is a start-up focusing on data center network chips and cloud network solutions. The company’s core team focuses on data center networks, chip research, and R&D experts who once worked in world-renowned enterprises such as Alibaba, Huawei and Cisco.
Liu Yongfeng, founder and CEO of YunSilicon, said that the rapid growth of computing power demand stems from digital transformation, the rapid development of AI and big data applications. In this circumstance, the software and hardware architecture based on traditional the IT architecture is increasingly unable to meet the demands of data centers for large scale, high bandwidth and low latency applications. YunSilicon’s DPU is based on the concept of end-network convergence and could promote data centers to evolve from architectures relying on single cores and a single computer’s computing power to the those that feature distributed cluster computing.
Zhang Wen, founder, chairman and CEO of Biren Technology, said his firm was working within the Chinese chip industry. Apart from DPUs, Biren is also paying close attention to the latest development of China-made CPUs and the frontier applications of China’s high-end chips such as automated driving and the Metaverse. This year has seen a steady stream of funding news for the DPU makers. Companies such as Dayu DPU, Smart & Connection, Yisi Technology, and Corigine, all have successively completed Pre-A or A rounds of financing.
