Overview
- Bolt Graphics, which announced Wednesday that its Zeus GPU test chip had taped out on TSMC’s 12nm FFC process, moved the project from FPGA models to manufactured silicon.
- The startup says a dual‑chip Zeus card delivers about five times the path‑tracing throughput of NVIDIA’s RTX 5090 at roughly half the power, with up to six times gains in select HPC tests, and these are company‑provided figures.
- Published specs describe single‑ and dual‑chiplet PCIe cards and a 2U server, up to 40 FP16 TFLOPs, 77 to 154 gigarays for path tracing, on‑chip cache up to 256 MB per card, and native 400 GbE I/O.
- Zeus targets lower total cost by using LPDDR5X and DDR5 memory instead of pricier GDDR, enabling larger memory pools and a claimed 17x cut in total cost of compute for rendering and HPC.
- Bolt now guides for production in Q4 2027 and reports a more than $500 million pipeline with over 14,000 early‑access members, but independent benchmarks and a developer‑kit timeline are still not public.