China has taped out its first domestically produced GPU which is as fast as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 & AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics cards. The GPU which falls under the JM9 series has been produced by the Chinese firm, Jingjia Micro and has been under production for a little over 2 years.
Jingjia Micro's JM9 Series GPU Tapes Out, China's Domestic GPU Is As Fast As The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Graphics Card
The Jingjia Micro JM9 Series GPUs have two chips, an entry-level version known as 'JM9231' which would offer performance levels similar to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card & a higher-end 'JM9271' which would offer the performance level of a GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. Jingjia went through some development hell to get these GPUs out in the market as they were indented for a launch in 2020 but the first chip is taping out in late Q3 2021.
On September 14 , Jingjiawei, a domestic GPU chip company, issued an announcement stating that the company’s new-generation graphics processing chip has completed the tape out and packaging phases. The product has not yet completed the test work, and has not yet formed mass production and external sales, and will not affect the company. The current performance has a greater impact, and the degree of impact on the company’s future performance is still unpredictable.
Based on the new statement from the manufacturer, it looks like while the Jingjia Micro has taped out its very first JM9 series GPU, it is still far from launching an actual product since the firm has not yet completed the test work and has not planned out mass production or external sales. So we are looking at at least 1 year before we can see this product in action in the retail segment. It is still one big achievement for the Chinese domestic GPU market which is on par with high-end GPUs that are 2 generations old.
Jingjia Micro JM9271 GPUs - Performance Target: NVIDIA GTX 1080 & AMD RX Vega 64
The Jingjia Micro JM9271 GPU will be the flagship chip that will feature a peak compute power of around 8.0 TFLOPs. This puts it close to the 8.9 TFLOPs of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080. Its specs include support for PCIe 4.0 x16 interface, up to 16 GB of HBM memory offering up to 512 GB/s of bandwidth, a pixel fill rate of 128 GPixels/s which is higher than the 111 GPixels/s of the GeForce GTX 1080, and a GPU clock speed of around 1800 MHz. The chip will feature a TDP of 200W which means that AMD & NVIDIA will have the upper hand due to better process nodes.
The GPU will feature HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.3 outputs for display with H.265/4K 60FPS encoding. It will also be compatible with OpenGL 4.5 and OpenCL 2.0 APIs. No DirectX support is mentioned.
While Jingjia Micro will not compete in terms of efficiency, having these GPUs being produced domestically will help the company offer attractive prices for their products against NVIDIA & AMD's lineup. We can expect more details such as performance and power numbers coming shortly. China is also working on its own HPC GPUs which will compete in the data center & cloud computing segment.
