Iluvatar CoreX targets Nvidia’s Rubin with GPU road map amid China chip push
Chinese chip designer outlines a multi-year GPU plan to outperform Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin platform within two years
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.
Iluvatar CoreX also unveiled four products under its Tongyang, or TY, series for edge computing, covering performance from 100 tera-operations per second to 300 tera-operations per second. The company said its TY1000 outperformed Nvidia’s AGX Orin in various testing scenarios.