Upstart's 5th-gen RDU aims to undercut Nvidia's B200 on speed and cost

AI infrastructure company SambaNova has raised $350 million to advance its dataflow architecture, which it pitches as an alternative to GPU-based AI systems.

Some of the money came from Intel Capital, scotching rumors Chipzilla wanted to buy SambaNova. Other participants in this funding round include Vista Equity, Cambium Capital, and several other VC funds that expect strong returns when SambaNova brings its latest generation of reconfigurable dataflow units (RDUs) to market.

Intel will get especially close to the upstart with a "multi-year" collaboration that aims to provide customers an alternative to GPUs for generative AI deployments. Naturally, that means SambaNova's new RDUs will use Xeon CPUs, but, beyond that, the alliance will include hardware-software co-design.

"We've got a product that's very competitive. They've got scale; they've got capital; they've got customers that we can collaborate on," SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang told El Reg.

Intel ...