With Xisi N100 Card, a New Chinese GPU Maker MetaX is Making its Debut

In the continuously evolving landscape of GPU development, China has seen a surge in new developers over the past few years. The latest addition to this dynamic field is MetaX, a promising startup that has recently unveiled its maiden product – the Xisi N100 graphics card.

The Xisi N100 is a compute and video processing GPU primarily designed to cater to the demands of artificial intelligence and video processing applications. This introductory product is just the beginning of what appears to be a broader strategic plan from MetaX, hinting at the company’s future ventures in the gaming graphics processor market. In a recent announcement, the company declared its plan to introduce its first gaming graphics processor by 2025.

At the moment, MetaX is all about AI and data center GPUs. Why, you ask? Well, it’s simple – they’re a good moneymaker and require pretty predictable software efforts. But here’s the twist – Yang Jian, one of the co-founders, has let slip that they’re planning to dive into the world of gaming GPUs by 2025. Their website even hints at some MXG-series GPUs in the works for graphics rendering. Although, it’s a little hazy right now whether these GPUs will end up in our everyday PCs or just be used for cloud gaming and data center applications​.

While we’re all waiting to see what MetaX can bring to the gaming GPU table, their Xisi N100 has already turned a few heads in the inference and video processing scene. This neat little card packs an N100 chip and HBM2E memory onboard and can crank out a performance of 160 INT8 TOPS and 80 FP16 TFLOPS. For all you non-techies out there, that’s pretty impressive! To give you an idea, Nvidia’s entry-level A30 compute GPU offers 330 INT8 TOPS and 165 FP16 TFLOPS. So, if MetaX’s own software stack (they call it MXMACA) works as they say it does, this little card could pack quite a punch​.

Video-wise, the MetaX N100 can handle AV1, AVS2, H.265, and H.265/HEVC formats, with resolutions of up to 8K. MetaX says it can encode up to 128 streams and decode up to 96 streams. They’re keeping mum on the exact resolutions for these streams, though. Also, they’re not spilling the beans about the manufacturing process for the Xisi N100. But judging by the advanced packaging with HBM2E, it seems like they’ve got a top-notch foundry cooking up their processor using some cutting-edge tech​.

So, MetaX is definitely shaking things up in the GPU world. Their first product and their big plans for the future could really make waves in the industry. But how big a splash they make all depends on whether they can deliver on their promises, go toe-to-toe with the big players, and keep up with the ever-changing demands of their target markets. One thing’s for sure, though – MetaX is definitely one to keep an eye on!