Meet HC1 The $200M Startup Chip That Makes AI Responses Instantaneous.
TAALAS HC1: The AI-on-Silicon Breakthrough Delivering 17,000 Tokens per Second The Canadian chip design startup TAALAS has demonstrated a stunning leap in AI inference technology. Their new HC1 chip features the Llama 3.1 8B model etched directly into its silicon a "hardwired" approach that sacrifices modifiability for unprecedented speed and efficiency. Mind-Blowing Speed: Instant Results By embedding the model directly into the hardware, the HC1 achieves an astonishing inference speed of 16,960 tokens per second . At this rate, entire pages of text are generated almost instantaneously. To achieve this, TAALAS utilized a 3-bit quantized version of the Llama 3.1 8B model. While this compression results in a slight trade-off in output quality compared to the full-precision model, the performance gain is transformative. The Power of "Hardwired" AI The HC1 chip is a massive engineering feat, boasting 53 billion transistors and a power draw of 2.5kW . Although th...