From the boom in 2017, to the return to rationality in the second half of 2019, and to the many AI applications today, the AI industry has entered a new stage of rapid development, and smart chip companies have also ushered in a period of rapid development.
Cambrian Technology, which has the first halo of AI chip design on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, ushered in a good start in the capital market in 2020. Although the AI industry in 2020 and 2021 still faces many challenges, the two annual reports of Cambrian after its listing show that its revenue has maintained rapid growth.
The latest 2021 annual report released by Cambrian shows that its annual operating income in 2021 is 720 million yuan, an increase of 57.12% over the same period of the previous year. The smart chip and accelerator card business contributed revenue of RMB 215 million, a year-on-year increase of 101.01%. The market responded positively to this. On the first trading day (April 18) after the annual report was released, Cambrian’s share price rose 6.81%.
The key to Cambrian’s rapid revenue growth lies in the success of the commercialization of its smart chip products and the effect of scale. With the formation of a complete combination of Cambricon cloud training and reasoning products, in-vehicle chip products represented by large computing power intelligent driving chips will become a new highlight of Cambricon’s revenue growth.
In the long run, the Cambrian’s constantly improving software and hardware ecology is its core competitiveness in the chip market.
In 2021, the revenue of all Cambrian products will increase significantly
When Cambrian submitted its prospectus two years ago, the outside world was able to fully understand the whole picture of this smart chip star company for the first time. Among them, there were bright spots and challenges. However, in the 2021 annual report released by Cambrian this month, the challenges faced at the beginning of the listing have been partially resolved, and new highlights have emerged.
The Cambrian 2021 annual report shows that for the whole year of 2021, the Cambrian achieved operating income of 721.0453 million yuan, an increase of 57.12% over the same period of the previous year.
Among them, the Siyuan 220 chip and accelerator card of the edge product line have landed in a number of leading companies, and the cumulative sales have exceeded one million pieces of large-scale sales , achieving revenue of 175 million yuan, and the revenue of the edge product line has increased by 741.10% over the same period of the previous year. .
Relying on the benchmarking effect and excellent reputation of the previous projects, the intelligent computing cluster system business actively participated in and successfully won the bid for Kunshan Intelligent Computing Center and other projects, achieving revenue of 456 million yuan, an increase of 39.91% over the same period of the previous year.
In the cloud product line business, the training of complete machine products has achieved certain sales progress, and the single product sales have achieved an income of 40.1477 million yuan.
These data are a good indication that Cambrian’s cloud edge products have achieved a lot in the past year, which reflects the continuous improvement of Cambrian’s software and hardware and the recognition of customers.
In terms of software and hardware ecological construction, in 2021 Cambrian released the reasoning and training integrated Siyuan 370 smart chip and accelerator card based on the fourth-generation smart processor micro-architecture (MLUarch03). Released a new inference acceleration engine MagicMind, which supports model parsing, automatic back-end code generation and optimization across programming frameworks.
The recognition of customers, especially the cooperation with leading customers in different industries, has directly led to a substantial increase in revenue. According to the annual report, Cambrian has conducted in-depth cooperation with several business departments of leading Internet companies such as Alibaba. The adaptation performance of Siyuan 370 chip and accelerator card (MLU370-S4/X4/X8) in vision, voice, image and text recognition and other scenarios exceeded customer expectations, and some scenarios have entered the stage of small batch sales.
In addition to the Internet field with huge demand, Cambrian has also imported and adapted with many leading banks in the financial field. Among them, the measured performance of MLU370-X4 in multiple business scenarios of China Merchants Bank exceeds that of competing products, which can greatly improve the efficiency of customers.
In 2021, Cambrian will also be shortlisted for the centralized procurement project of artificial intelligence general computing equipment for leading communication operators together with server manufacturers, taking the first step to expand into the communication operator industry.
Leifeng.com learned that Cambrian has more than 100 customers, including leading companies in the smart rail transit industry, smart animal husbandry industry, and scientific research and education industry. In the field of intelligent computing cluster system business, the market share of Cambrian is also in the first echelon.
The competition in the chip industry, especially in AI chips, is an ecological competition combining software and hardware. Only with continuous investment and sufficient talents can we remain competitive.
Cambrian’s total R&D investment in 2021 is 1.13 billion yuan, an increase of 47.83% over the same period of the previous year. At the same time, it also attracted more than 200 senior experts to join the Cambrian, and through the implementation of the “2021 Restricted Stock Incentive Plan”, 7.2 million restricted shares were awarded to 641 eligible incentive objects, attracting and retaining outstanding talent.
As of 2021, the number of Cambrian R&D personnel has reached 1,213, accounting for 81% of the company’s total number of employees, and a total of 2,526 patents have been applied for. This also means that Cambrian products rely more on the strength of the team than the strength of individuals from research and development to implementation.
Of course, another key to improving the competitiveness of chip companies is the market layout.
Cloud edge chips are fully deployed, and large computing power chips in the automotive market may become a bright spot for growth
As early as Cambrian’s first press conference in 2017, Cambrian had clarified its cloud-edge-end product layout and the concept of soft-hard collaboration, and has been improving its product layout since then.
In March this year, Cambrian released a new training accelerator card MLU370-X8, equipped with dual-chip four-core Siyuan 370.
The mid-to-high-end MLU370-X8 is combined with high-end training products Siyuan 290 and Xuansi 1000, which further enriches Cambrian’s training computing power delivery method. At the same time, it cooperates with the MLU370-X4 and MLU370-S4 smart accelerator cards based on Siyuan 370 to form a complete cloud training and inference product portfolio.
Legend: MLU370-X8 single-machine 8-card deployment configuration
The Cambrian, which already has a complete product portfolio in the cloud and edge and generates a lot of revenue, is also betting on the huge potential automotive large computing power chip market.
According to data from Gartner, a technology research, analysis and consulting company, the global automotive semiconductor market is expected to reach US$65.1 billion in 2022, accounting for 12% of the global semiconductor market, and becoming the fastest growing part of the semiconductor segment. Gartner also predicts that by 2025, the global automotive AI chip market will soar to $23.6 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 31%.
As the cornerstone underpinning the development of auto-driving technology, auto-driving chips were once dominated by Israeli company Mobileye (acquired by Intel in 2017). However, with the development of autonomous driving from L2 level to L4 level, large computing power automotive chips will be the future trend. In 2022, the computing power of NVIDIA Orin autonomous driving chip mounted on Weilai ET7 will reach 250TOPS, which is the latest Mobileye model that will be launched in 2021. Ten times the computing power of the chip’s 25TOPS.
Qualcomm’s high computing power autonomous driving chip platform snatched its largest customer BMW from Mobileye, which shows that what car OEMs need is high computing power automotive chips. According to public information, almost all of the new models that will be launched in 2022 and later, especially smart electric vehicles, have chosen large computing power autonomous driving chips from Nvidia, Qualcomm and Huawei.
The market space for large computing power automotive chips is large enough, but currently only a few giant companies such as NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Huawei can provide corresponding products, which also brings huge opportunities to the Cambrian. In January 2021, Cambrian newly established Xingge Technology, a subsidiary focusing on intelligent driving chips, and conducted independent financing, introducing strategic investors such as NIO, SAIC and CATL’s funds.
According to the Cambrian 2021 annual report, Xingge Technology plans different grades of in-vehicle chip products according to the differentiated demand for artificial intelligence computing power in the automotive market. The planned in-vehicle chip for high-end intelligent driving will use the fifth-generation intelligent processor architecture and instruction set under development by Cambrian, and support Cambrian’s unified basic system software platform.
Cambricon Xingge Executive President Wang Ping revealed in his speech at the “China Electric Vehicle Hundred People Forum (2022)” that Cambricon Xingge will release two products in 2022-2023, one is the SD5223 chip for the L2+ market, The other is the SD5226 series that is aimed at the L4 market and supports on-board training.
It is reported that the Cambrian Xingge L2+ integrated chip solution for traveling and parking will be released this year. A single SoC can realize the integrated function of traveling and parking. The maximum computing power reaches 16TOPS, which will promote the automatic driving system to cover entry-level models of about 100,000 yuan. .
The AI computing power of SD5226 series products for L4 level will exceed 400 TOPS and is expected to be released next year.
Leifeng.com believes that from the perspective of market strategy, Cambrian’s entry into the automotive market from entry-level models with greater demand will not only help it quickly verify products, build on its knowledge in the automotive market and expand the market, but also help Cambrian has accumulated experience and moved towards a higher-end market, becoming one of the few chip companies that can compete with Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Huawei.
From a technical perspective, Cambrian has accumulated rich experience in the field of high computing power cloud training chips, and its expansion into the high computing power vehicle chip market will have higher efficiency and success rate. In addition, Cambricon’s self-developed cloud, edge, and terminal smart chips and processor products provide a unified platform-level basic system software and programming interface, which can improve the ease of use for customers on the one hand, and further build on the other hand. The Cambrian software and hardware ecology realizes a virtuous circle of coordinated development of cloud, edge and terminal.
The future development potential of Cambrian Xingge is huge.
Cambrian into the fast lane
Cambrian has gone through 6 years since its establishment in 2016. 6 years is not a long time for the chip industry. It took eight or ten years for many domestic chip companies to be widely recognized by the market and become well-known chip companies in China.
As a long-term industry, the chip industry needs to choose the right direction and continue to invest in order to have and maintain competitiveness. Talent, technology and capital are the core elements for the success of chip companies. At present, it seems that the Cambrian has all three elements, but it still needs continuous efforts to become a relatively successful or even excellent chip company.
A research report by market research firm Tractica predicts that the market size of AI chips will grow from US$5.1 billion in 2018 to US$72.6 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 46.14%. Cambrian is on the right path, and has long adhered to the technical concept of “integration of cloud, edge and terminal, integration of training and promotion, and coordination of software and hardware”. Nowadays, the gradual improvement of the software and hardware ecology allows Cambrian to accelerate the landing of products and build a competitive advantage little by little.
A chip industry practitioner told Leifeng.com: “After the Cambrian’s software platform is perfected, it will be of great help to the landing of its products.”
Next, Cambrian will expand the intelligent vehicle chip with large computing power with market potential based on its own advantages, and enter the fast lane of development, which also makes the future of Cambrian more worth looking forward to.
There is also a background that cannot be ignored. In recent years, the state has vigorously encouraged the development of the integrated circuit industry, which has brought rare opportunities for all chip companies including the Cambrian.
Since its listing, the Cambrian has often been criticized by the outside world for being overvalued. Now, compared with those chip companies in the primary market that are often valued at tens of billions of dollars, have almost no income, and have not even made products, the annual rate is 57%. The revenue growth of 30 times the price-to-sales ratio (PS) of the Cambrian may be underestimated by the market.
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