There has been a lot of communication in the last few months about GPUs or CPUs that the Chinese industry would be preparing by freeing itself as much as possible from Western technologies. Moore Threads is a company that was part of all these communications last year. It is a new GPU manufacturer based in Beijing.
If Moore Thread is mainly focused on GPU chip structure, we have to admit that the company (which is only 18 months old) is not very well known, even in its own country. But it is led by Zhang Jianzhong, former global vice president and general manager of NVIDIA. If the company works on GPUs dedicated to computing and simulation, it has also just presented products for desktop PCs. The MTT S60 and MTT S2000 are 12nm GPUs and are designed using the Moore Thread Unified System Architecture, or MUSA. The MTT S60 delivers 6 TFLOP of power and is equipped with 8GB of LPGDDR4X memory. The MTT S2000, on the other hand, offers 12 TFLOPS and comes with 32GB, but the memory reference is unknown at this point.
The most interesting fact is that Moore Threads has shown that the MUSA architecture supports DirectX Runtime, a feature absent from the previously revealed Chinese graphics cards that “only” support OpenCL, OpenGL Vulkan and NVIDIA’s CUDA. As an added bonus, these new MUSA GPUs have support for AV1 encoding and decoding. For encoding, the new GPUs will support H.264, H.265 and AV1, while for decoding, the GPUs will have the addition of VP8 and VP9 decoding. For the record, only the new ARC DG2 GPUs from Intel announced a few hours ago, have support for AV1.
In its public presentation, Moore Thread stressed that its cards were almost ready to replace “traditional” products. For the demonstration, an MTT S60 graphics card was presented running the game League of Legends, running at a smooth 1080p resolution. Of course, we all know that League of Legends is not the most demanding game (far from it). But the demonstration had another purpose: to show that this Chinese GPU could behave like any other without modification or tinkering… The company took the opportunity to declare that it has designed its next graphics card to work entirely with design software and game engines, such as Unreal Engine, Unity, Houdini and D5.
