Anthropic, the creators of Claude AI, are reportedly in early talks with a UK startup whose SRAM tech can boost AI inference by 100x & reduce costs by 10x.
Anthropic Reportedly In Early Talks With Fractile, A UK-based Startup Working on the fusion architecture as an AI Inference Booster
Currently, Anthropic sources its chips from various companies, including NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon. This trio allows the company to keep running its AI infrastructure without major concerns that are often associated with relying on a single chipmaker. But as compute demand intensifies in the AI space, many AI firms are now looking to invest in in-house chips that suit their requirements.
Based on recent reporting by The Information, Anthropic is said to be in early talks with a UK-based startup called Fractile. Fractile is becoming a highlight in the AI space due to its new technology, which it calls the Memory Compute Fusion Architecture.
The architecture works by moving less data to the DRAM, lowering the reliance on off-chip memory, and doing all the data go-through within the chip itself. For this, the company has devised its own SRAM tech, similar to NVIDIA’s Groq LPUs or Groq 3 LPX.
NVIDIA’s acquisition of Groq allowed it to integrate the latest LPU in its upcoming Vera Rubin ecosystem. These chips act as an AI Inference booster & this is done through the incorporation of large amounts of SRAM and super-high bandwidth for scale-in and scale-up.
As such, NVIDIA itself terms the Groq 3 LPU as an Inference accelerator, packing 500 MB of SRAM, 150 TB/s of SRAM bandwidth, and 2.5 TB/s of scale-up bandwidth. These are packaged within the Groq 3 LPX Rack that houses 256 LPUs and a massive 128 GB of SRAM for low-latency processing.
Fractile’s solution is similar, though the company claims that its architecture targets a 100x speed up in AI inferencing while reducing the costs by 10x versus NVIDIA’s Groq. The team at Fractile working on the project comes from big firms such as NVIDIA, Graphcore, and Imagination Technologies.
These are some big numbers, but the company has yet to design any test chips, so these early talks can initiate the process of Anthropic’s in-house chip development. Anthropic still heavily relies on external chip makers as it signed a Multi-Gigawatt deal with Broadcom, and reports suggest that it will soon add a fourth name to its compute portfolio in the form of AMD.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech’s Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
Source link