Blaize Expands Asia-Pacific Distribution in Automotive, Retail, Metro and Industrial Markets via Partnership with Weikeng

June 03, 2021 at 08:00 AM EDT

Weikeng Group, a multi-billion operation with broad-based diversified customer base to distribute Blaize products in China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia

Blaize, the AI computing innovator revolutionizing edge and automotive computing solutions, today announced a partnership with Weikeng to provide demand generation distribution for Blaize products in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia edge computing markets.

Blaize is delivering AI computing hardware and software products built to overcome today’s unmet requirements for compute and productization of AI applications at the edge. As such, Weikeng’s leadership in edge computing: automotive, IoT and industrial segments including smart vision in retail, metro, security and factory is a great match for the Blaize product line. Blaize Pathfinder and Xplorer platforms coupled with the Blaize AI Software Suite, enable developers to usher in a new era of more practical and commercially viable edge AI products across a wide range of edge use cases and industries. And Blaize AI Studio provides the industry’s first end-to-end AI productization solution for the edge.

“Weikeng’s demonstrated technical expertise and leadership will help us achieve greater access to the fast growing Asia-Pacific markets for AI edge computing and automotive,” said Dinakar Munagala, CEO of Blaize. “Together with Weikeng we are bringing forth a new era of AI computing capabilities to the region with more compute performance using less power and more flexibility at lower cost than legacy processor solutions.”

"We are impressed by the capabilities of the Blaize Pathfinder and Xplorer edge AI computing platforms,” said Stan Chi, COO of Weikeng. “Our customers in IoT, smart retail, smart city and smart factory applications will benefit from our partnership with Blaize. In automotive, their innovations in areas such as ECU consolidation will find a receptive audience amongst our customer base.”

Blaize Leadership Focus on Systems & Energy Efficiency, Low latency, Flexibility

The Blaize embedded and accelerator platforms are built on the the Blaize Graph Streaming Processor (GSP) architecture designed for the demands of edge computing. With 16 GSP cores and 16TOPS of AI inference performance within a 15W power envelope, GSP delivers up to 20x better system-level perf/$ efficiency vs. GPU/FPGA//CPUs for edge AI applications. In addition, GSP enables 6x less memory bandwidth, and 10x lower latency. This efficiency comes without compromising flexibility - Blaize GSP is a 100% programmable processor – and features advanced capabilities including multi-threading and streaming. The Blaize AI Software Suite comprised of Blaize Picasso and the AI Studio product lead the industry with open standards and ease of accessibility reducing the time to get edge applications into production from months to days.

About Weikeng Group

Weikeng Industrial Co., Ltd (TW stock code: 3033), the parent company of Weikeng Group, was established in January 1977. Its main business is the distribution of various semiconductor electronic components, information channel products and technical services to customers. Weikeng Group has deeply cultivated the business market in Greater China (Taiwan, Hong Kong, China) and Southeast Asia (Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam), built strong sales channels in market and provided experienced/ qualified technical services for customers among aforesaid regions. In 2020, Weikeng group's revenue reached NT$58.4 billion (approximately US$2 billion).

About Blaize

Blaize leads new-generation computing unleashing the potential of AI to enable leaps in the value technology delivers to improve the way we all work and live. Blaize offers transformative edge computing solutions for AI data collection and processing, with focus on smart vision applications including automobility, retail, security, industrial and metro. Blaize is funded by strategic and venture investors DENSO, Daimler, SPARX Group, Magna, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Temasek, GGV Capital, Wavemaker and SGInnovate. With headquarters in El Dorado Hills (CA), Blaize has teams in Campbell (CA), Cary (NC), and subsidiaries in Hyderabad (India), Manila (Philippines), and Leeds and Kings Langley (UK), with 300+ employees worldwide. www.blaize.com

Blaize, the Blaize logo, GSP, and other designated brands included herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blaize, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand and product names are trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.