Alibaba established Pingtouge chip company named by Jack Ma

At this year's Yunqi Conference, Alibaba announced the establishment of an independently operated chip company - "Pingtou Ge Semiconductor Co., Ltd."

This company is an independent chip company formed by integrating Zhongtian Microsystem Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Zhongtianwei), which Alibaba acquired in April this year, and the self-developed chip business of the DAMO Academy. It is Alibaba's chip layout to promote cloud integration.

Currently, the DAMO Academy chip team has nearly 100 members, most of whom have experience working for major chip manufacturers such as AMD, ARM, Nvidia, and Intel. Together with the recently acquired C-SKY Microelectronics, it is estimated that the number of people in the new company will reach 200-300. In the future, Pingtou Ge Semiconductor will build an intelligent Internet of Things chip platform for many industries such as automobiles, home appliances, and industry.

Like DAMO Academy, Pingtou Ge's goal is to eventually operate independently, with sufficient investment and support from Alibaba Group in the early stages. It will become profitable after several years of operation and eventually grow into a self-sustaining enterprise.

As for the origin of the name "Flat-headed Brother", just like "Dharma Academy", it was decided by Jack Ma, and the reason behind it came from his recent trip to Africa.

"Flat-headed Brother" is another name for the honey badger, which is the only animal in the genus Honey Badger in the family Mustelidae. It lives in tropical rainforests and open grassland areas and is "the most fearless animal in the world."

Ma Yun was determined to name the company “Pingtou Ge”. He said that he named the chip company “Pingtou Ge” because of its three characteristics:

1. Passionate, tenacious and persistent. The honey badger is listed as the "most daring animal" in the Guinness World Records. It never gives up when encountering prey or danger, fights tenaciously, and is always hunting.

2. Believe in the greatness of small things and pursue your dreams bravely. Although the honey badger is small in size, it is not afraid of ferocious beasts and poisonous insects that are dozens of times larger than it. It can often win big with small, successfully counterattack, and is fearless.

3. Smart, optimistic, brave and tough. The flat-headed brother is very smart, can use tools, is good at finding the opponent's weaknesses, and is brave and good at fighting. At the same time, its skin is thick and tough, and it has strong defensive capabilities, making it difficult for ordinary animals to hurt it.

Jack Ma has previously stated that the era of the Internet of Things is coming and people need cheaper, more efficient, more inclusive and safer chips.

Choosing which business scenario, what customized chip to make, and how to perform targeted optimization in the later stage are some of the most difficult steps that the Alibaba chip team has experienced so far.

Through comprehensive and in-depth internal research, they decided to start with accelerating image and video processing because of Alibaba's internal business needs and because in the cloud, data centers, smart cities, video detection and processing, on-device assisted driving systems, and future autonomous driving systems, the above businesses are essentially similar from an algorithmic perspective.

This AI chip is expected to be released in the second half of next year. The first batch of chips will be used in cloud data scenarios such as Alibaba data centers, city brains, and autonomous driving. In the future, it will be open to the public through Alibaba Cloud, so that AI capabilities such as speech recognition and image recognition can be used in the cloud.

In simulation verification tests, the prototype of this chip saved 35% of the hardware costs for deploying Alibaba City Brain.

In April this year, Alibaba acquired C-SKY Microelectronics, the only company in mainland China that has its own embedded CPU IP Core. Currently, the cumulative shipments of SoC chips based on C-SKY CPU IP cores have exceeded 800 million.

The full acquisition of Zhongtian Micro is just a node in Alibaba's entire chip layout. In fact, Jack Ma has been paying attention to Zhongtian Micro since earlier, including the subsequent investment in AI chip startups such as Cambrian and DeePhi Technology, which are all part of Alibaba's strategic layout of the chip industry.

Chips are the core of computing power, and computing power is the foundation of all artificial intelligence applications.

After sorting out the context, Alibaba had already found the right application scenarios before the chip was taped out, and had already invested in domestic AI chip star unicorn companies, standing firm in the track of AI underlying computing power. The next step is to consider how to build a huge ecosystem for Alibaba chips.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.