Just a few months ago, a report made the rounds that there was a so-called tape-out of the JM9 series from the Chinese graphics card manufacturer Jing Jiawei (via Mydrivers.com) has given. A tape-out describes the point in time in the development of a chip at which the design is finally determined. From then on, no more changes are made to the micro-architecture.
Now Jing Jiawei has apparently taken another important step in the development of competitive accelerators, like again the Chinese website Mydrivers.com reported.
The first models of the JM9 series are already available from selected customers. Now troubleshooting, so-called debugging, and optimization can begin. This in turn means that graphics cards are no longer too far removed from industrial mass production.
Another Chinese chip designer attracted attention a few weeks ago. How far the development of the graphics card Fantasy One
Innosilicon has really advanced, however, is not known:
New graphics cards from China
How can they compare to Nvidia?
How fast is the JM9 graphics chip?
Mydrivers.com speaks of a theoretical computing power of the now completed chip of 1.5 teraflops (FP32). That would roughly correspond to the performance of an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050, at least on paper.
Earlier rumors saw the JM9 roughly on par with the GTX 1080. However, that was probably the model JM9271
meant, while the chip that is now being delivered to the test customers is the much weaker one JM9231
seems to act:
The JM9 series only supports OpenGL and OpenCL, but not DirectX, which is so important for Windows games.
No competition yet for Nvidia and Co.
Even if the graphics cards cannot match the performance of Nvidia’s top Pascal graphics cards such as the GTX 1080, this is still a decisive and, above all, not to be underestimated step in the development of your own graphics cards in the Far East.
The JM9 will find its fields of application, but it should primarily be a large-scale field test. In addition to troubleshooting, this is also extremely important for the development of drivers. We are curious to see how long it will take for the first graphics cards designed in the Far East to compete with current models from Nvida, AMD and soon also Intel.
