I don't see Graphcore (GC) as a direct competitor for AKIDA. In particular they are not interested in handheld devices, probably because Graphcore is designed as a stand-alone processor and requires a large power supply.
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1334578&page_number=3
There will be a market for fairly simple, small accelerators, typically delivered as an IP core that goes inside a mobile phone; we know that some of the big phone manufacturers are already working on that. We are not doing products for that market.
There will be a market for [devices analogous to] ASICs. Take, as an example, a company with a very specific workload that has a lot of users — perhaps they run a big social network — they have an opportunity to create a very specific function and build it into a chip, and deploy that in their data center to speed that function up.
These ASIC-type solutions will be a big market, but again, we’re not doing that.
What we are doing is a general-purpose processor that you can program to do a lot of different things, incredibly efficiently. If that technology is available in a cloud computing environment, it solves problems very easily, it’s versatile, easy to program, and gives you very efficient results … we think that is the technology that will win.
In EVs, there may even be an opportunity for AKIDA on the edge feeding inputs from sensors to a GRAPHCORE IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) as the central vehicle control.
They also talk about their strategy to overcome the problems of a startup breaking into the big boys pool.
Enterprise is interesting, [particularly] companies trying to do real deep learning in the enterprise space — we’re interested in and focused on that. The problem is, how do you reach those customers? They are all over the world, in different vertical markets. It’s a difficult market to reach for a startup company. Our strategy has been pretty cynical there — we’ve built a close relationship with Dell. Dell is an investor in our company. By partnering with them, we get fabulous access to the market and can get our technology into the hands of those customers in a number of different forms — it might be a 4U all-in IPU server, or it could be a workstation with a single IPU PCI card inside, for example. There are lots of different options for how we can target that market and we’ve got a channel to do that as well.
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