Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1242
At the “2022 Volcano Engine Motive Power Conference” held last week, Yang Zhenyuan, vice president of ByteDance in charge of Volcano Engine and Data Center, disclosed the progress of Byte’s chip self-development, saying that self-developed chips involve video encoding and decoding, cloud reasoning acceleration and other scenarios, and said that Byte is also exploring the use of RISC architecture chips in the cloud with chip suppliers. At present, Byte has not developed general-purpose chips such as CPU and GPU. The chips that have been launched are self-developed and used, and will not be sold externally.
“LatePost” exclusively obtained some more detailed information about Byte Core. Byte has launched at least four chip projects, including AI chips, server chips, FPGA NICs (FPGA-shaped smart network cards, FPGAs are programmable logic gates) Array) project and RISC-V project. Among them, AI chips have been taped out, and the main direction of server chips is video codec chips.
It is understood that the head of the byte chip team is Wang Jian, the technical director of the “Data-System” department, who reports to Yang Zhenyuan. Wang Jian is also one of the main leaders of the open source committee established by Byte this year. He joined ByteDance in 2016. His main work experience lies in network and data system architecture, and he is not from the chip industry.
Under Wang Jian, the byte chip team has a head of digital technology. The main leaders of the AI chip department are Shi Yunfeng and Li Jifeng. Shi Yunfeng graduated from the School of Information Science and Technology of Peking University. He has 13 years of work experience. He has worked in MediaTek, Meiman and Huaxintong (a joint venture established by Qualcomm and the Guizhou government). He joined Byte in 2018. Li Jifeng also graduated from Peking University. Before joining Byte in 2020, he worked for IBM, EDA manufacturer Cadence and Bitmain.
The RISC-V project and the server chip project are led by Shan Lu. Lu Shan has worked in the industry for more than 20 years. He has worked for Intel and Qualcomm in the United States. He has experience in developing multiple types of chips for server, IoT and other scenarios. He joined ByteDance in 2019.
The FPGA NIC project is in charge of Luo Layong, who graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering and Information Science of the University of Science and Technology of China, and worked in Microsoft Research Asia and Tencent Network Platform Department. FPGA NIC is one of the solutions to realize intelligent network card and DPU (data processor, which can be regarded as an upgraded version of intelligent network card). The advantage is that it is more flexible and easier to respond to business changes.
According to “LatePost”, Byte has been making cores for nearly 2 years, and it started in the second half of 2020. At that time, Byte had formed a small team internally. In the spring of 2021, the byte chip team began to accelerate its expansion and currently has more than 200 people.
In horizontal comparison, the byte chip team is not large. Founded in 2018, Alibaba’s chip subsidiary, Pingtou Ge, currently has about 1,500 people and has successively launched products such as AI chips and ARM CPUs. Zheku, the OPPO chip subsidiary that started two years ago like Byte Core, has expanded to 2,000 people. Zheku released an AI chip for mobile phones last year.
Under the shortage of talents, Byte’s snatch-up attitude is not radical. People who know byte recruitment told “LatePost” that the byte core building team has four rounds of technical interviews and one HR interview. Now chip companies often recruit two rounds of technical interviews and one HR interview. Agile startups , the recruitment process can be completed within a week. The salary advantage of Byte is not obvious, and the annual package quotation is the same as the current 30%-50% increase in job-hopping in the chip industry.
Yang Zhenyuan said at last week’s Volcano Engine Conference that the purpose of byte core building is not to sell to the outside world, but to develop customized chips for its own needs to reduce costs and improve performance.
The main chip projects that Byte has launched are closely related to its business: AI chips are used to process a large number of recommendation algorithms; video codec chips correspond to the massive video processing needs of short video applications such as Douyin and TikTok; DPU chips correspond to improving the overall data center. efficiency needs. According to Yang Zhenyuan, 95% of Byte’s business has been run in its own data center. The function of the DPU is to reasonably allocate different data processing tasks to the CPU or GPU, and take over data center operation and maintenance tasks such as network, security, virtualization, and storage from the CPU to improve efficiency.
When the amount is large enough, self-developed chips can reduce costs, better control supply, and at the same time achieve better soft-hard coordination and improve the overall effect.
Self-use positioning explains the team configuration of Byte Core. The general manager Wang Jian is not from the chip industry, but as the person in charge of the data system and network architecture, he is familiar with the computing power and network requirements of the byte data center. This is the usage scenario of self-developed chips. Compared with introducing a person in charge from the outside, Wang Jian, who has joined Byte for many years, can also better communicate and coordinate among various departments.
The heads of each product line of Byte Core are mostly industry backbones who have worked for more than ten years. What Shi Yunfeng, Li Jifeng and Luo Layong have in common is that they have about 15 years of work experience and grew up in China. Among them, Shi Yunfeng and Li Jifeng have worked together before. In the postgraduate stage, they both joined the Microprocessor Research and Development Center of Peking University, which is one of the first institutions in China to develop domestic CPUs. A chip practitioner commented on the project leaders of byte chips, saying that for the company, they are “the year of battle, very affordable”.
In contrast, Huawei HiSilicon and Ali Pingtou, who want to sell chips to others, have more chip executives and technical leaders with rich industry and market experience. For example, Yao Gang, the head of Alibaba Pingtou, previously led the development of projects such as Kunpeng (ARM CPU), Shengteng (cloud AI chip), and Kirin (mobile phone SoC) at HiSilicon, spanning different scenarios such as servers and mobile terminals. Jiao Guofang, who had previously resigned from Huawei HiSilicon to join Biren, and Lin Wei, who joined ARM CPU startup from Ali Pingtou, all started working in the late 1990s. Some of them worked at the U.S. headquarters of international giants such as Trident, Intel, and AMD. work experience.
The core-making road of domestic Internet manufacturers can now be divided into two factions. One faction, represented by Tencent, entered the game with “investment + part of self-research”, the team size is relatively small, and the chips are used by themselves. At the end of last year, Tencent Cloud and Smart Business Group CEO Tang Daosheng said in an interview with “Chinese Entrepreneur” that the core idea of Tencent’s core building is based on its own needs, either to reduce costs or to use infrastructure more efficiently.
The other group is represented by Ali Pingtou Ge and Baidu Kunlun Chip. They hope to sell chips to the outside world and have a larger market intention. Ali is particularly ambitious. They have released the ARM CPU Yitian 710, a general-purpose chip for data centers that is difficult to develop, last year. The consortium formed by Alibaba and Zhejiang State-owned Assets had bid last year for Tsinghua Unigroup, which owns important semiconductor assets. If successful, Alibaba will expand its chip business to mobile terminal chips (Unisplendor Zhanrui) and memory (Yangtze Storage, a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup), and acquire The server business (New H3C, a subsidiary of Tsinghua Unigroup), which is closely coordinated with the cloud computing business, failed in the end.
According to “LatePost”, before and after the Yunqi Conference last year, Ali began to consider splitting Pingtou Ge to let him raise money independently, which would allow him to obtain more development funds and a more independent market position as a chip supplier. People close to the matter revealed that Brother Pingtou has been in contact with external investors since this year, but the progress has not been smooth, and the spin-off plan has been temporarily shelved.
Byte’s current core-making route is closer to Tencent. Tencent has released 3 chips, including AI chips, video transcoding chips and high-performance network chips (which can be understood as DPUs). The chip project structure for bytes is similar. At the same time as self-research, both Tencent and Byte are actively investing abroad. Tencent has invested in AI chip company Suiyuan, DPU company Yunbao, AI vision chip company Aixin, etc.; Byte has invested in RISC-V start-up Ruixin, RISC-V-based AI processor manufacturer Sim Computing, GPU Company Moore Thread and DPU Company Yunmai Xinlian, etc.
Judging from the existing team size of Byte Core, it needs to carry out a lot of cooperation with the outside world. A chip practitioner commented that if Byte really needs to be completely self-developed, and at the same time mass-produce AI chips, video codec chips, smart network cards and other products, and continue to maintain the comprehensive cost-effective advantage of competing products, including soft Two or three thousand people are not necessarily enough for hardware development work; however, if a large number of hardware parts are outsourced and the software adopts an internal team, it is possible to control the team to the order of hundreds of people. This can output some customized results with a relatively small input to meet internal needs.
Combined with the latest OKRs of Byte CEO Liang Rubo disclosed last week, cost reduction and efficiency enhancement are the core goals of Byte now. Enhancing its own computing power and saving computing power costs, rather than seeking greater chip business opportunities, may be the direction of Byte for a period of time.
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