Low-Power

Imagination Technologies' Furian Graphics Processor Targets Computer Vision and Other GPU Compute Tasks

Imagination Technologies' new PowerVR Furian graphics microarchitecture is the company's most significant advancement since 2011's Rogue, which has formed the microarchitecture foundation of multiple subsequent product families (Figure 1). While still based on the tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR) approach that dates back to the mid-1990s, Furian is tailored for not only the increasingly demanding graphics performance requirements of modern SoCs and systems based on them but also their Read more...

NVIDIA's Jetson TX2: Embedded Designs Gain a Deep Learning Upgrade

Jetson TX2 is NVIDIA's latest board-level product targeted at computer vision, deep learning, and other embedded AI tasks, particularly focused on "at the edge" inference (when a neural network analyzes new data it’s presented with, based on its previous training) (Figure 1). It acts as an upgrade to both the Tegra K1 SoC-based Jetson TK1, covered in InsideDSP in the spring of 2014, and the successor Tegra X1-based Jetson TX1, which BDTI evaluated for deep learning and other computer vision Read more...

Himax, CEVA, emza Partner to Develop Low Power Vision Processing Platform

Image-sensor maker Himax, processor core vendor CEVA, and algorithm provider emza Visual Sense have partnered to develop a low-power "always on" vision sensor module with integrated visual analytics. The three companies offered a conceptual demonstration of the product, dubbed the WiseEye IoT vision sensor, at last month's Consumer Electronics Show. Assuming that WiseEye IoT is able to perform with sufficient accuracy and frame rates, with its target power consumption of 5-10 mW for common Read more...

Qualcomm's Latest Snapdragon Enhancements Heavily Leverage a Lithography Shrink

Qualcomm formally unveiled the Snapdragon 835, its latest premium-tier mobile processor, at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month after a last-fall "tease". Sporting eight CPU cores and fabricated in Samsung’s latest 10 nm process, the new chip represents the next step in the evolution of the Snapdragon 800 product line, building on features previously introduced in the Snapdragon 820 and 821. The 14 nm-fabricated Snapdragon 820, initially unveiled in March 2015 with fuller Read more...

CEVA-X1 DSP Core Targets Cellular IoT Opportunities

In March, InsideDSP covered the CEVA-X4, the first member of the company's cellular DSP core family based on its CEVA-X architecture framework, and focused on smartphones and tablets that support gigabit-per-second LTE-Advanced and LTE-A Pro protocols. In June, the company introduced the CEVA-X2, with half the scalar units of its bigger sibling (two versus four), and targeting wearables and other devices that harness 10 Mbps LTE-Cat 1 (formerly known as LTE-M Category 1). And now the company Read more...

The CEVA-XM6 Vision Processor Core Boosts Performance for Embedded Deep Learning Applications

Hard on the heels of the public release of CEVA's second-generation convolutional neural network toolset, CDNN2, the company is putting the final touches on its fifth-generation processor core, the CEVA-XM6, designed to run software generated by that toolset. Liran Bar, the company's Director of Product Marketing, acknowledged in a recent briefing that the new core represents an evolutionary step, versus revolutionary break, from its predecessors: the CEVA-MM3101 (introduced in 2012) and the Read more...

Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Putting the Reality in Augmented and Virtual Reality

Based on the pace of investment and acquisitions, and the level of buzz (some would say "hype") surrounding augmented reality and virtual reality, it is obvious that these technologies are hot. With good reason, I think. Augmented and virtual reality have long held enormous promise, but the challenge of making them work robustly – along with the cost, size and power consumption of the necessary hardware – have severely limited their use. In the past few years, though, what had been steady Read more...

Next-generation Cadence Tensilica Fusion DSP Core Expands Capabilities, Aspirations

The general trend of recent times is toward developing DSPs that are specialized for particular "killer" applications, such as wireless or embedded vision. Many other applications also need DSPs, however, and Cadence's Tensilica Fusion DSP core family, which complements the company's more application-specific DSPs, is one example of an architecture that aspires to serve a broader range of general applications. When Cadence introduced the first Fusion family member (now referred to as the Fusion Read more...

CEVA Second-generation Deep Learning Toolset Supports Additional Frameworks and Topologies

Last year, when CEVA introduced the initial iteration of its CDNN (CEVA Deep Neural Network) toolset, company officials expressed an aspiration for CDNN to eventually support multiple popular deep learning frameworks. At the time, however, CDNN launched with support only for the well-known Caffe framework, and only for a subset of possible layers and topologies based on it. The recently released second-generation CDNN2 makes notable advancements in all of these areas, including both more fully Read more...

Case Study: How to Implement Deep Learning for Vision on Embedded Processors

We're hearing more and more about the effectiveness of deep learning for a growing range of applications. With the surge in the volume of data available for training, and reduction in the cost of computing, technologists have turned to deep neural networks for solutions to compute-intensive applications such as speech and image recognition, 3D object recognition, and natural language processing. Particularly where the virtually unlimited processing power and memory of cloud and enterprise Read more...