Week In Review: Design, Low Power


MLCommons debuted the latest results for the MLPerf Inference v3.0 and Mobile v3.0 benchmark suites, which measure the performance and power-efficiency of applying a trained machine learning model to new data in data center, edge, and mobile use cases. Overall, MLCommons said the results showed both power efficiency improvements and significant gains in performance in some benchmark tests. Seve... » read more

AI ASICs Will Become Increasingly Application-Specific


Back in 2017, I blogged about AI ASICs being not exactly ASICs. One of the primary reasons for not calling AI acceleration chips ASIC is because historically ASIC or Application Specific Integrated Circuit has referred to a fixed hardware block with limited programmability. AI ASICs on the other hand offer significant programming via frameworks such as Tensorflow and the point was that they are... » read more

New Methodologies Create New Opportunities


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what open source verification means today and what it should evolve into, with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director for the Emulation Division at Siemens EDA; Ashish Darbari, CEO of Axiomise; Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas Software; Serge Leef, program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA; Tao Liu, staff hardwa... » read more

Optimizing What Exactly?


You can't optimize something without understanding it. While we inherently understand what this means, we are often too busy implementing something to stop and think about it. Some people may not even be sure what it is that they should be optimizing and that makes it very difficult to know if you have been successful. This was a key message delivered by Professor David Patterson at the Embedde... » read more

The Murky World Of AI Benchmarks


AI startup companies have been emerging at breakneck speed for the past few years, all the while touting TOPS benchmark data. But what does it really mean and does a TOPS number apply across every application? Answer: It depends on a variety of factors. Historically, every class of design has used some kind of standard benchmark for both product development and positioning. For example, SPEC... » read more

MLPerf Benchmarks


Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks about the new MLPerf benchmark, what’s missing from the benchmark, and which ones are relevant to edge inferencing. » read more

Revving Up For Edge Computing


The edge is beginning to take shape as a way of limiting the amount of data that needs to be pushed up to the cloud for processing, setting the stage for a massive shift in compute architectures and a race among chipmakers for a stake in a new and highly lucrative market. So far, it's not clear which architectures will win, or how and where data will be partitioned between what needs to be p... » read more