Axera Wins “Rising Star Product Award” at ICDIA-IC Show 2024
The 2024 China IC Design Innovation Conference and 4th IC Application Exhibition (ICDIA-IC Show 2024) was held from September 25 to 27, 2024. Under the theme “Innovation in Applications: Creating a New Ecosystem,” the conference focused on AI application demands and technological development, featuring discussions on AI large models and chip technology, RISC-V ecosystem, communication and RF technology, and IC design and innovation in China. Over 3,000 attendees from IC companies, electronic R&D firms, system solution providers, OEM supply chains, and investment enterprises participated, Axera, as a domestic leader in AI foundational computing platforms, made a significant presence at the event.
The conference announced the “2024 Excellent Chinese Chips - Innovative IC” award winners, aiming to select outstanding chip products across key sectors including AI computing power, storage, and microprocessors/controllers nationwide. The initiative promotes high-quality domestic chips to system OEMs and end users, advancing the adoption of Chinese-made ICs. Axera’s self-developed AXNeutron AI processor won the “Rising Star Product Award” for its exceptional performance, cost-effectiveness, and environmental benefits.
The AXNeutron AI processor is built around operator instruction sets and dataflow microarchitecture. The processor’s core design utilizes programmable dataflow microarchitecture to enhance energy efficiency and computing power density. Its flexible architecture ensures comprehensive support for operator instruction sets across various AI applications, while its robust software toolchain facilitates swift developer adoption. Additionally, its hardware-software co-design ensures swift iteration of the AI processor, maintaining its competitive edge. The AXNeutron AI processor significantly reduces AI application development and O&M costs, making AI implementation more economical, efficient, and environmentally friendly.
The outstanding performance of the AXNeutron AI processor stems from Axera’s accurate prediction years ago of Transformer as a mainstream network architecture. At the event, Jianwei Liu, Axera’s co-founder and Vice President, shared his technical insights on AI processors in the intelligent era. He emphasized that AI has become a stable and reliable intelligent infrastructure, leading a cost-driven productivity revolution. Compared to traditional GPUs, AI processors offer a more economical, efficient, and environmentally-friendly approach to enterprise AI adoption. Axera began developing Transformer-based AI processors in 2022, with its Model 650 setting new efficiency benchmarks for Transformer architectures.
According to Liu, Axera has completed its AI processor portfolio across high, medium, and low computing power segments, achieving mass production in smart city and assisted driving applications. These processors deliver an order of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency compared to GPGPU chips. The AXNeutron AI processor also enables AI developers to work more cost-effectively on general-purpose large model applications, including image-to-text search, general detection, image-to-text generation, and AI agents.
As large language models drive society’s intelligent transformation into a new phase, Axera remains committed to its mission of “AI for all, AI for a better world,” continuously advancing intelligence at the edge and terminal while promoting the development and popularization of AI applications.
