China’s Tencent launches three new chips
Folks walked previous the Tencent sales space on the China Worldwide Truthful for Commerce in Companies in Beijing on Sept. 6, 2020.
Noel Celis | AFP | Getty Photographs
GUANGZHOU, China — Tencent on Wednesday launched three chips it developed, marking the primary time the Chinese language web big has publicly spoken about its progress in semiconductors.
It comes as China continues to try to bolster its home chip trade, making it a strategic priority for the nation’s know-how sector.
Tencent, one of many world’s largest gaming firms and the operator of China’s hottest messaging service WeChat, has been investing in areas together with chips and cloud computing to diversify its enterprise.
One of many semiconductors is a synthetic intelligence chip referred to as Zixiao. The chip is ready to course of photographs, video and pure language, which could possibly be used for AI voice assistants, for instance, that depend on the flexibility for computer systems to grasp and course of human language.
The second is a video transcoding chip. These are required to transform movies into completely different codecs.
The third is a so-called community card designed to assist cloud computing processes.
China’s know-how giants have all been pouring cash into semiconductors.
In August, Baidu launched its second-generation artificial intelligence chip. Final month, Alibaba launched a chip designed for servers and cloud computing.
Nonetheless, Chinese language firms are solely designing their very own chips. Manufacturing and different components of the supply chain still rely heavily on foreign companies, which is a problem to China’s home ambitions.
Tencent didn’t reveal which firms have been manufacturing the silicon.
“Chips are the core a part of {hardware} and the core infrastructure of the economic web,” Dowson Tong, the CEO of Tencent’s cloud and sensible trade group stated in an official WeChat publish by the corporate.