Rebellions, a fabless AI chip design firm based in South Korea, has announced its plans to release the next-generation AI NPU chip, REBEL, within the year 2024. According to an interview with ZDNet Korea, the company's Chief Technology Officer, Oh Jin-wook, has confirmed the development and the anticipated launch window for the new chip.

The REBEL chip is specifically tailored to enhance the processing capabilities for large-scale language models and multimodal models. It incorporates a combination of Samsung's advanced 4nm manufacturing process and the HBM3E 12H memory, which is expected to deliver a significant boost in performance. Additionally, the chip will support high-speed 800Gb Ethernet connectivity.

The REBEL family is set to include two variants: the REBEL-Single, which is based on a single core, and the REBEL-Quad, which consists of four cores. Both models will be equipped with HBM3E 12H memory stacks, with the REBEL-Quad capable of accelerating models with parameters scaling up to 175 billion plus.

Oh Jin-wook has stated that the REBEL-Single is planned for release within 2024, while the larger-scale REBEL-Quad, supported actively by Samsung Electronics, is expected to launch earlier than initially planned, moving from around 2026 to the beginning of 2025.

In a strategic move, Rebellions signed a definitive merger agreement with SAPEON Korea, another AI semiconductor design company under the SK Group, on August 18th. Post-merger, SAPEON Korea will continue as the surviving entity under the name Rebellions and will be led by the current CEO of Rebellions, Park Sung-hyun. The newly merged Rebellions is anticipated to have a valuation exceeding 1 trillion won (approximately 5.33 billion RMB).

Oh Jin-wook commented on the merger, stating that while both SAPEON and Rebellions are NPU development companies, they have different business models and partners, offering unique perspectives. The merger is expected to combine the strengths of both entities to develop superior solutions in the AI chip market.