Graphcore was founded in 2016 in Bristol, UK, by Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles, two silicon industry veterans who anticipated the need for a new type of compute technology, specifically designed for artificial intelligence.
The solution they developed, the Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU), is a massively parallel processor with 1,472 independent cores capable of running nearly 9,000 independent program threads. The IPU’s Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) architecture reflects the requirements of modern AI workloads, unlike GPUs and CPUs.
