Steve Roddy

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Steve Roddy is the chief marketing officer at Quadric.io. Previously, he was vice president of the Machine Learning Group at Arm, and before that he served as vice president for IP licensing businesses at Tensilica (acquired by Cadence), and Amphion Semiconductor. He also held product management roles at Synopsys, LSI Logic, and AMCC.

Author's Latest Posts

Heterogeneous NPU Data Movement: What The Execution Flow Shows
By Steve Roddy - 14 Apr, 2026 - Comments: 0

Heterogeneous NPU designs bring together multiple specialized compute engines to support the range of operators required by modern AI models. This approach enables coverage across diverse workloads, but it also introduces a structural consequence: intermediate data must move between those engines. That movement consumes power, adds latency, and requires additional silicon resources, with effect... » read more

The On-Device LLM Revolution
By Steve Roddy - 20 Feb, 2026 - Comments: 0

The AI world is experiencing a fundamental shift. After years of cloud-centric inference dominated by massive data center GPUs, we're witnessing an accelerating migration of language models to edge devices. These are not the trillion-parameter behemoths that require server farms, but the "Goldilocks zone" models: 3B to 30B parameters — large enough to deliver genuinely useful AI capabilities,... » read more

Overflowing Zoo: The Power Of Compilers
By Steve Roddy - 16 Oct, 2025 - Comments: 0

The term “model zoo” first gained prominence in the world of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) beginning in the 2016-2017 timeframe. Originally used to describe open-source public repositories of working AI models — the most prominent of which today is Hugging Face — the term has since been adopted by nearly all vendors of AI chips and licensable Neural Processors Units (... » read more

That’s Not A DSP!
By Steve Roddy - 17 Jul, 2025 - Comments: 0

In the 1986 hit comedy movie "Crocodile Dundee," the title character – a rough and tumble Australian transported to the mean streets of New York City – is confronted by street thugs brandishing a switchblade knife who demand his wallet. In response he cooly smirks and pulls a knife out of his belt that is 10 times the size of the would-be assailants’ weapon and delivers the signature line... » read more

The Coming NPU Population Collapse
By Steve Roddy - 12 Jun, 2025 - Comments: 0

At some point in everyone’s teenage years of schooling we were all taught in a nature or biology class about cycles of population surges and then inevitable population collapses. Whether the example was an animal, plant, insect or even bacteria, some external event triggers a rapid surge in the population of a species which leads to overpopulation and competition for resources (food, space, s... » read more

Trapped By Legacy
By Steve Roddy - 15 May, 2025 - Comments: 0

At Quadric, we do a lot of first-time introductory visits with prospective new customers. As a rapidly expanding processor IP licensing company that is starting to get noticed (even winning IP Product of the Year!) such meetings are part of the territory. Which means we hear a lot of similar-sounding questions from appropriately skeptical listeners who hear our story for the very first time. Th... » read more

No Fooling With Voxel Pooling
By Steve Roddy - 13 Mar, 2025 - Comments: 0

A variety of new and complicated transformer models have emerged in the past 18 to 24 months as new “must have” networks in advanced automotive use cases. These novel architectures often introduce new network operators or novel ways of combining tensors – often from different types of sensors – in ways to enhance detection and recognition of objects in L3 / L4 / L5 ADAS and autonomous d... » read more

Vision Language Models Come Rushing In
By Steve Roddy - 17 Feb, 2025 - Comments: 0

Just when you thought the pace of change of AI models couldn’t get any faster, it accelerates yet again. In the popular news media, the introduction of DeepSeek in January 2025 created a moment that captured headlines in every newspaper and website heralding comparisons to the Sputnik moment of 1957. But rapid change is also happening in many quarters that are hidden from view of the Chat-App... » read more

MACs Are Not Enough: Why “Offload” Fails
By Steve Roddy - 16 Jan, 2025 - Comments: 0

For the past half-decade, countless chip designers have approached the challenges of on-device machine learning inference with the simple idea of building a “MAC accelerator” – an array of high-performance multiply-accumulate circuits – paired with a legacy programmable core to tackle the ML inference compute problem. There are literally dozens of lookalike architectures in the market t... » read more

To (B)atch Or Not To (B)atch?
By Steve Roddy - 18 Nov, 2024 - Comments: 0

When evaluating benchmark results for AI/ML processing solutions, it is very helpful to remember Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the famous line: “To be, or not to be.” Except in this case the “B” stands for Batched. Batch size matters There are two different ways in which a machine learning inference workload can be used in a system. A particular ML graph can be used one time, preced... » read more

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