Iluvatar CoreX targets Nvidia’s Rubin with GPU road map amid China chip push

Iluvatar CoreX targets Nvidia’s Rubin with GPU road map amid China chip push

By South China Morning Post
Publication Date: 2026-01-27 13:00:00

Chinese chip designer Shanghai Iluvatar CoreX Semiconductor has unveiled a multi-year graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture road map, aiming to surpass Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin platform within two years, amid the country’s push for semiconductor self-reliance.

The company said its Tianshu architecture had outperformed Nvidia’s Hopper platform last year, while a second architecture, Tianxuan, would be built to benchmark against the US firm’s Blackwell platform. A third, Tianji, was designed to overtake Blackwell in 2026, while a fourth, Tianquan, was projected to surpass Rubin by 2027, after which Iluvatar CoreX planned to move towards what it described as a “breakthrough” architectural design.

Iluvatar CoreX said it would roll out multiple products based on four generations – all named after traditional Chinese terms for the Big Dipper.

The company highlighted efficiency gains from Tianshu, claiming more than 90 per cent effective utilisation of computing power. Innovations included features that reduce redundant memory access to boost effective bandwidth and cut power use, and ease resource contention through dynamic task allocation. It said Tianshu delivered about 20 per cent higher average performance than Hopper on DeepSeek’s V3 model.

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s sale of its H200 chips to China remains uncertain, as US approval has met an ambiguous response from Chinese authorities. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang arrived in China on Friday to attend company…