Kneron Unveils Next-Gen AI Products at Computex 2024

TapTechNews on June 6th. On Wednesday at Computex 2024, the artificial intelligence chip startup Kneron launched its next-generation AI products - the KNEO330 server and the PC device equipped with the third-generation NPU chip KL830.

It is known that the company was founded in 2015 by CEO Liu Juncheng and Zhang Maozhong. It is a company providing edge computing artificial intelligence (edgeAI) technology, and its investors mainly include well-known groups such as Horizons Ventures under Li Ka-shing, Qualcomm, Foxconn Group, Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, and China Development Capital.

Liu Juncheng, the CEO of Kneron, said at the press conference that currently, companies using generative AI functions and applications rely on giants such as Microsoft and Amazon for cloud services and purchase a large number of chips from companies such as Nvidia or AMD. Due to considerations of data privacy and security, enterprises may be reluctant to hand over their own data to external companies and conduct model training through their AI tools. Therefore, they can use Kneron's technology to build internal servers of enterprises to build enterprise-exclusive AI applications. He hopes that Kneron can profit from the enterprise's AI business and become an alternative to giants such as Nvidia and AMD.

Two products were released at this press conference - the KNEO330 server and the PC device equipped with the third-generation NPU chip KL830. The official also plans to launch its self-developed fourth-generation NPU chip KL1140 in 2025.

The KNEO330 server has an AI computing power of 48 TOPS and can support up to 8 concurrent connections, and supports LLM and StableDiffusion. Under lower hardware conditions, its RAG accuracy is comparable to that of cloud solutions, reducing the overall AI cost of small enterprises by 30% to 40%.

The PC device equipped with the third-generation NPU chip KL830 did not disclose specific details. A Hewlett-Packard device equipped with the third-generation NPU chip KL830 was used for demonstration at the press conference. Kneron said that it is currently working closely with several of the largest PC OEM manufacturers, and these manufacturers will be the first batch of customers of its latest chip (TapTechNews note: the specific list has not been announced).

The KL830 chip is a neural processing unit (NPU), which works in conjunction with the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU) to implement running artificial intelligence (AI) tasks, and can provide a comprehensive computing power of up to 10eTOPS@8bit, with a peak power consumption of only 2W and supports many relatively low-parameter large language models.

Kneron said that KL830 can also be used through a USB AI accelerator stick, enabling any device, whether it is a broadband router, an Internet of Things camera or a traditional computer, to become an edge AI device.

Computex 2024 Topic