Dr. Jon Peddie interviews Bolt’s Founder & CEO

Dr. Peddie: “We have plenty of GPU companies, do we need any more, and if we do, why?”

Singh: “We wanted to take a more unique approach to designing graphics processors…there’s definitely space for another graphics processor vendor in the market. What we’re doing is so unique that we can provide a lot of differentiation for our users and customers. We were founded in 2020 and in 2024 we’ll have production silicon ready to ship to customers.”

Dr. Peddie: “If you started in 2020, then the idea probably percolated in 2018?”

Singh: “2014…it’s been a long road…it’s really interesting that the market has changed so much for the better. People understand the concept, the use case, there are games and applications using this, people are making films that are 99% computer-generated and all of that’s ray traced and simulated. We see that the market has grown a lot and it’s ready for new entrants.”

Dr. Peddie: “GPUs can be used in a variety of applications: gaming, conventional computer graphics, AI, etc. Are you looking at any particular niche?”

Singh: “We’re really focusing today on ray tracing and applications in the film space, render farms, cloud, and even cloud gaming. Eventually we’ll grow past ray tracing into more general-purpose applications of graphics but as a startup we want to be really focused and we’re starting with ray tracing.”

Dr. Peddie: “Even ray tracing today is a pretty crowded field: Intel, AMD, Nvidia are all doing it. What are you going to bring to the party that they already haven’t and maybe have in the pipeline?”

Singh: “Our unique approach makes a big difference. We don’t have an existing architecture to build around. So we started with a blank slate and said ‘How can we solve this problem at scale?’ What we’ve built is a unique architecture – it doesn’t look like a GPU or CPU – and that brings benefits in terms of performance, efficiency, and even cost that traditional GPUs can’t approach.”

Dr. Peddie: “Even in ray tracing we have specialization – first you have your generalized APIs that you better be compliant with and then there are ray tracing and materials libraries, and then there are the applications themselves. That space is has been pretty well defined as to what you have to do to exist in that space without creating problems for your customers. So how are you going to handle that?”

Singh: “We take a 2-step approach to supporting user applications that exist and new that may need to exist in the future. The first is we definitely want to support existing APIs like from the Khronos Group and DirectX but we also have a proprietary SDK that gives the user much lower-level control over the engines and that’s where you get much better performance and efficiency. We allow the user to define how they want to approach our engines. We’re also working with with the application side – the game engines, the DCC tools directly so we can enable them to easier support our hardware. Our goal is a regular person that’s using the game engine doesn’t have to worry about the specifics on what we do that’s different, moreso they just get the functionality they desire. It’s much faster, more efficient, but in the end they don’t have to worry about whether it’s a Bolt product behind or an Nvidia GPU.”

Dr. Peddie: “It sounds almost like you’re envisioning a plugin – that you’d be a plugin to a game engine or to an application?”

Singh: “That’s the initial step – eventually we will be fully integrated inside the backends of a lot of the major engines. Today we are doing prototyping and testing as a plugin.”

Dr. Peddie: “When are we going to see this beautiful thing?”

Singh: “We have customers taping out chips in 5nm next year and we’ll start sampling those chips to customers later next year and we’ll be able to go into production in early 2025.”

Dr. Peddie: “So you just described an IP company, not a chip company. So is Bolt an IP company?”

Singh: “Yes. Bolt’s an IP company. Our business model is similar to Arm, Alphawave, Imagination Technologies where we do all the effort in designing and optimizing the core and then we work with our customers that go into silicon.”

Dr. Peddie: “I’m looking forward to reading-actually, I’m looking forward to writing about it.”