"Electronic Figurine", "Nurturing-Type Graphics Card"... Moore Threads is Going Public | Game Technology Observation

Written by Feng Min 

Edited by Liu Shiwu 

While various domestic game manufacturers are exerting efforts to come up with new ideas, the process of domestic chipmakers striving to go public is also in full swing. 

After Enflame Technology and Biren Technology announced the initiation of IPO listing guidance, Moore Threads Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Moore Threads") changed its market entity type to other limited liability companies on October 28, and the company's registered capital increased from the initial 24.4132 million yuan to 330 million yuan. On November 12, Moore Threads completed the filing and registration for guidance with the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau and officially launched the A-share listing guidance.

Moore Threads is a high-tech integrated circuit company mainly engaged in GPU chip design and is known in the industry as the "Chinese NVIDIA". The company was established in 2020, and its founder, Zhang Jianzhong, joined NVIDIA in 2005 and served as NVIDIA's global vice president and general manager of the China region. He has rich experience in GPU-related technologies and product fields and is a key figure in promoting NVIDIA's rapid development in the Chinese market.

Since its establishment, Moore Threads has undergone six rounds of financing, with a cumulative financing amount of several billion yuan. The investors include well-known investment institutions and enterprises such as Shenzhen Capital Group, Sequoia Capital China, ByteDance, Tencent Investment, and Zhongguancun Science City. In four years, Moore Threads has been iterating its products at a rate of almost one chip per year, developing three high-performance and fully functional GPUs, namely Sudi, Chunxiao, and Quyuan, becoming a representative of domestic high-precision and advanced chips.

Image source: Internet

From the perspective of the technical product process, the development of Moore Threads refers to some of NVIDIA's experiences. For example, from products to ecosystems, Moore Threads has "benchmarked" against NVIDIA.

The company adheres to a unified architecture. From its establishment to the present, it has implemented a complete intelligent computing product line from chips, graphics cards to clusters. It is the only GPU startup that has layouts in both the B-end and C-end markets. Therefore, it is considered by many industry insiders as the "domestic GPU company that most resembles NVIDIA".

In addition, similar to NVIDIA, Moore Threads started from gaming graphics cards - many users got to know Moore Threads from the domestic gaming graphics cards launched by this company. Up to now, Moore Threads has launched several graphics cards such as MTT S30, MTT S70, and MTT S80. Among them, the MTT S80, which is positioned as a gaming graphics card, is its currently developed product with the strongest performance. It has become the only domestic graphics card that can smoothly run this year's domestic 3A masterpiece "Black Myth: Wukong" and supports DirectX12.

The emergence of Moore Threads fills the nearly blank market of self-developed GPUs in China. However, GPU technology has been developed for more than thirty years. If Moore Threads wants to achieve head-on competition with manufacturers such as NVIDIA and AMD in a short period of time, its product technology still needs to be refined and accumulated.

Taking the gaming graphics cards, which are the core business of GPU manufacturers, as an example, although the graphics card performance of Moore Threads already supports the running of "Black Myth: Wukong", when running the game test program, the host equipped with MTT S80 performs poorly in terms of compatibility, frame rate, and picture effect. For this reason, during the game's initial release, Moore Threads released the latest optimized driver, enabling the game frame rate to reach about 50 frames under high-quality conditions, making up for some players' regrets.

It is also for these reasons that the graphics cards of Moore Threads are often ridiculed by players as "electronic figurines" and "growing-up graphics cards".

Image from Bilibili up主 'Channel包'

Of course, the application of GPU in the gaming field is the foundation, but this technology is also no longer exclusive to gaming graphics cards. In the current situation where various chip manufacturers are flourishing, how to make differentiations is also a problem that every enterprise must consider. This may also be the X factor for Moore Threads, as a "rising star", to achieve a curve overtaking in the case of facing greater development resistance in the gaming graphics card field.

At present, the vast majority of domestic enterprises choose to conduct research in the field of AI chips. The "difference" of Moore Threads lies in taking the all-functional GPU route, focusing on the research and application of general computing, providing the world with accelerated computing infrastructure and one-stop solutions, and providing AI computing support for the digital and intelligent transformation of various industries.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, the application fields of GPU are constantly expanding. Whether it is the early gaming market or the currently continuously researched and developed virtual reality and deep learning markets, they all require the R & D support of GPU technology. According to the latest report from Jon Peddie Research, the global GPU market size is expected to exceed 98.5 billion US dollars in 2024, showing a strong growth trend.

Zhang Jianzhong once stated at the First Global Unicorn Enterprise Conference that GPU-driven AI technology will continue to dominate the global technological development, and AI will deeply penetrate various industries, releasing new commercial values.

After the news of the listing guidance filing was disclosed, several listed companies also responded to their cooperation with Moore Threads on the interactive platform.

Image source: Internet

Today, when the GPU chip track is still monopolized by NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel (which has been exerting efforts in developing independent graphics cards in recent years), if Moore Threads successfully goes public, it will become an important milestone in the domestic GPU industry and also mark a further improvement in the domestic GPU strength.

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This article is from the WeChat public account "36Kr Games".