California chip startup Bolt Graphics said it powered on the first silicon for its Zeus GPU project, a 12nm test chip made by TSMC that the company said ran without issues, Engadget reported¹.

The test chip measures 6 square millimeters and draws 1.4 watts, compared with 35 watts on the FPGA Bolt previously used to prototype the design, according to Engadget's account of a company announcement¹. Bolt also said it opened an office in Taipei to work closer to manufacturing partners¹.

The test die is not the product Bolt plans to sell. The Zeus GPU is a separate chip the company intends to make on TSMC's N5P process, with volume production not expected until 2028¹. Bolt said it chose the 2020-era N5P node to avoid competing for scarce newer wafers¹.

Zeus is built around RISC-V cores and Bolt's own path-tracing hardware aimed at electromagnetic simulation for work such as radar sensors and camera lenses¹. Planned PCIe cards would combine soldered LPDDR5X with DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, allowing memory up to 384GB, Engadget said¹.

Bolt has not published performance figures for the test chip, saying only that it beat internal estimates¹. CEO Darwesh Singh told HPCwire the design showed hardware-accelerated physics that he said had not been done before, Engadget reported¹.

Two days after the bring-up news, Reuters reported Bolt was seeking about $100 million at a valuation of around $700 million, citing three people familiar with the matter¹. In April, Bolt said more than 14,000 users had signed up for early access and claimed a product pipeline worth more than $500 million, without naming customers, and said Zeus could cut compute costs by up to 17 times versus current hardware¹. Those claims have not been independently tested¹.

Sources

1. EngadgetBolt Graphics powers on its first Zeus GPU1:30 PM

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