S.Korean AI chip developer Rebellions releases Atom SoC

South Korean AI chip developer Rebellions Inc. announced on Monday the release of its AI chip Atom, a system-on-chip (SoC) designed for data centers and large companies in the cloud sector.

Atom is the first AI semiconductor chip in Korea to support the natural language processing (NLP) technology of the Transformer architecture, the source technology behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

The Transformer model is a neural network that learns the context and meaning of data by tracking relationships within it, such as the relationships between words in a sentence. It can also be utilized as a vision model for applications such as image search and has reduced power consumption by up to 20% of that of the leading NVIDIA A100 by streamlining its scope of work.

Rebellions completed the design of Atom in June last year and it underwent a 5-nano extreme ultraviolet (EUV) process at the Samsung Electronics foundry.

The company has stated that it would install Atom in a lightweight version of KT Corp.'s ultra-large AI service MI:DEUM, which is set to launch in the first half of the year. MI:DEUM is based on OpenAI's GPT-3, which is widely recognized as the most powerful language processing AI tool and has 200 billion or more parameters, enabling it to generate natural conversation in Korean and perform mathematical calculations with improved capabilities compared to ChatGPT's limited abilities in the Korean language.

As part of the Korean government's plan to invest 826.2 billion won ($646 million) by 2030 in the development of processing-in-memory (PIM)-centered AI semiconductors for low-power data center operations, Rebellions will participate in government-led projects as a member of the KT-led "Korean AI Pool Stack."
Write to Da Eun Choi at max@hankyung.com