China’s Moore Threads to unveil AI chip road map to rival Nvidia’s CUDA system

Founder, chairman and CEO Zhang Jianzhong will unveil the Beijing-based firm’s fifth-generation GPU architecture during its inaugural MUSA Developer Conference on December 19 and 20 in the nation’s capital, according to the company’s latest post on WeChat.

MUSA refers to the firm’s proprietary platform, Meta-computing Unified System Architecture – a Chinese-developed alternative to Nvidia’s widely used CUDA platform, for Compute Unified Device Architecture, released in 2007. These platforms provide the software layer that lets developers harness the power of GPUs for applications.

The staging of the conference next week also reflects Moore Threads’ increased confidence after raising about 8 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) in Shanghai, which ranked as the mainland’s second-largest initial public offering this year.