Sapion, a global AI semiconductor company, is driving the domestic AI semiconductor market with its first commercialized AI semiconductor chip, the 'X220,' having achieved the highest rating from MLPerf.

Sapion announced on the 13th that its 'X220' has proven to have the world's best performance, recording processing performance approximately 2.3 times faster than NVIDIA's latest GPU, the A2, at the recently held MLPerf.

Sapion is a project launched by SK Telecom to improve SK Group's artificial intelligence infrastructure, and an independent entity has been established. It has been utilized in the AI speaker 'NUGU', the intelligent video security solution 'T-view', and the AI media quality improvement solution 'Supernova'.

The MLPerf benchmark is a test that evaluates how quickly AI semiconductors output accurate results. MLPerf is divided into Training and Inference tests, and MLPerf Training consists of eight workloads including use cases such as computer vision, reinforcement learning, and language.

The benchmark conducted by Sapion was in the 'Inference: Datacenter' category, which measures the performance of high-performance AI services in data centers, making Sapion the first to achieve results in Korea.

In the test measuring the performance of high-performance AI services for data centers (cloud), Sapion stated that the X220-Compact achieved 2.3 times higher performance and the X220-Enterprise achieved 4.6 times higher performance compared to the NVIDIA A2 in that category.

Sapion also achieved 2.2 times higher efficiency for the X220-Compact and 2.0 times higher efficiency for the X220-Enterprise compared to NVIDIA in terms of performance per unit of power consumption (based on maximum power consumption).

In particular, Sapion stated that although the X220 is a 2020 product released using a 28nm process to enhance price competitiveness, it did not lag behind the latest competing products utilizing fine processes such as 7nm.

In addition, Sapion announced that it became the first in Korea to be listed in the 'Available' category, the commercialization stage, successfully verifying the maturity of its product, which includes not only hardware but also software.

Ryu Su-jeong, CEO of Sapion, stated, “As one of the world’s leading AI semiconductor companies, Sapion is very pleased that the X220, whose competitiveness has already been verified through internal commercialization, is receiving significant attention in the global market after being recognized for its objective performance excellence by MLPerf.” She added, “We plan to focus on expanding the X220 into various application fields and will further enhance its performance in the second half of next year."We are confident that we will create a gap with our competitors with the next-generation X330 chip," they stated.