Company Research Report: Etched

Company Overview

• Name: Etched

• Mission: To revolutionize the AI hardware landscape by creating specialized chips for transformers, achieving unprecedented speed and cost efficiency compared to existing GPU solutions.

• Founded: Not specified

• Founders: Not specified

• Key People: No specific information about key people is available.

• Headquarters: No information is available.

• Number of Employees: No information is available.

• Revenue: No information is available.

• Industry Recognition: Etched is renowned for developing the world's first ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) specifically targeting transformer models, providing breakthrough performance in running AI models at a speed and cost unmatched by GPUs.

Products

Sohu

• High-Level Description: Sohu is a specialized ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) designed for transformer-based AI models. It's the first of its kind and provides a significant performance improvement over traditional GPUs.

• Key Features:

• Transformer Specialization: Sohu is optimized specifically for transformers, such as those utilized in state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT, Llama-3, and Stable Diffusion.

• Performance: An 8xSohu system can handle over 500,000 tokens per second for Llama 70B.

• Efficiency: Much higher FLOPS utilization (over 90%) compared to GPUs (~30%).

• Memory and Compute Optimization: Capable of handling large throughput without being bottlenecked by memory bandwidth.

• Open-Source Software Stack: Unlike the proprietary and complex software ecosystems for traditional GPUs and TPUs, Sohu offers a fully open-source stack for ease of use and customization.

• Expandability: Ready to support models with up to 100 trillion parameters.

• Innovation in AI Product Development: Enables real-time applications previously infeasible with GPUs, such as real-time video generation and rapid AI model inference.

Recent Developments

• Funding: Etched has successfully raised $120 million to further develop and scale the Sohu project.

• Product Launch: The introduction of Sohu marks a significant advancement in AI-specific hardware, addressing the compute and efficiency bottlenecks of current AI models.

• Strategic Partnerships: Etched has partnered with TSMC for production using their 4nm process, securing resources necessary for rapid deployment.

• Pre-Orders and Demand: There is already a significant demand for Sohu, with early customers reserving millions of dollars' worth of hardware.

• Investor and Market Interest: The convergence toward transformer models across industries has validated Etched’s bet, positioning Sohu as a critical component in the AI infrastructure of tomorrow.

Additional Information

This report highlights the pioneering work of Etched in the AI hardware sector, specifically through the development of their Sohu ASIC, which represents a substantial shift in how AI models can be executed in terms of both speed and cost efficiency. If correctly adopted, Sohu could transform numerous AI-dependent industries by making previously unfeasible applications real-time and cost-effective.