An Ideal Always-Sensing Subsystem Architecture


Always-sensing cameras are a relatively new method for users to interact with their smartphones, home appliances, and other consumer devices. Like always-listening audio-based Siri and Alexa, always-sensing cameras enable a seamless, more natural user experience. Through continuous sampling and analyzing visual data, always-sensing enables use cases such as: “Find a face” detection for... » read more

Can Compute-In-Memory Bring New Benefits To Artificial Intelligence Inference?


Compute-in-memory (CIM) is not necessarily an Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution; rather, it is a memory management solution. CIM could bring advantages to AI processing by speeding up the multiplication operation at the heart of AI model execution. However, for that to be successful, an AI processing system would need to be explicitly architected to use CIM. The change would entail a shift ... » read more

Nightmare Fuel: The Hazards Of ML Hardware Accelerators


A major design challenge facing numerous silicon design teams in 2023 is building the right amount of machine learning (ML) performance capability into today’s silicon tape out in anticipation of what the state of the art (SOTA) ML inference models will look like in 2026 and beyond when that silicon will be used in devices in volume production. Given the continuing rapid rate of change in mac... » read more

Looking Beyond TOPS/W: How To Really Compare NPU Performance


There is a lot more to understanding the true capabilities of an AI engine beyond TOPS per watt. A rather arbitrary measure of the number of operations of an engine per unit of power, the TOPS/W metric completely misses the point that a single operation on one engine may accomplish more useful work than a multitude of operations on another engine. In any case, TOPS/W is by no means the only spe... » read more

New Neural Processors Address Emerging Neural Networks


It’s been ten years since AlexNet, a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) model running on GPUs, displaced more traditional vision processing algorithms to win the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC). AlexNet, and its successors, provided significant improvements in object classification accuracy at the cost of intense computational complexity and large da... » read more

Powering The Edge: Driving Optimal Performance With Ethos-N77 Processor


Repurposing a CPU, GPU, or DSP is an easy way to add ML capabilities to an edge device. However, where responsiveness or power efficiency is critical, a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) may be the best solution. In this paper, we describe how the Arm Ethos-N77 NPU delivers optimal performance. Click here to read more. » read more

Powering The Edge: Driving Optimal Performance With Ethos-N77 Processor


Repurposing a CPU, GPU, or DSP is an easy way to add ML capabilities to an edge device. However, where responsiveness or power efficiency is critical, a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) may be the best solution. In this paper, we describe how the Arm Ethos-N77 NPU delivers optimal performance. Click here to immediately download the paper. » read more

Using FPGAs For AI


Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are progressing at a rate that is outstripping Moore's Law. In fact, they now are evolving faster than silicon can be designed. The industry is looking at all possibilities to provide devices that have the necessary accuracy and performance, as well as a power budget that can be sustained. FPGAs are promising, but they also have some sig... » read more

Scalable Platforms For Evolving AI


Wear and tear on big, heavy vehicles such as trains can cause unexpected delays and repairs, not to mention create safety hazards that can go unnoticed for months until they become critical. In the past, maintenance teams personally examined the undercarriage of a locomotive to look for stress cracks and other anomalies. Later, imaging and sonar technologies were introduced to find what the hum... » read more

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