British semiconductor firm Graphcore has launched the C600, a PCIe card that adds support for the 8-bit floating point (FP8) specification. FP8 aims to provide a common format that accelerates AI development by optimising memory usage and works for both AI training and inference. In addition to Graphcore, FP8 is supported by industry giants including NVIDIA, ARM, Intel, and Qualcomm. The C600 is based on Graphcore’s MK2 IPU and developers up to 560 TFLOPS of FP8 performance and 280 TFLOPS for FP16. It’s a PCIe Gen 4 dual-slot card with a thermal draw power of 185W. “We are making the…