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Intel-influenced Movidius Neural Compute Stick Increases Memory, Lowers Price, Reprioritizes Frameworks

When Movidius unveiled the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, based on its Myriad 2 VPU (vision processor), at the May 2016 Embedded Vision Summit, the company targeted a $99 price tag and initially planned to support the TensorFlow framework, with support for Caffe and other frameworks to follow. A lot's changed in a year-plus, most notably Intel's acquisition of Movidius announced in September. The company's new version of the Neural Compute Stick drops the price by 20%, switches from plastic to Read more...

AImotive Expands Into Silicon IP for Deep Learning Inference Acceleration

AImotive has been developing its aiDrive software suite for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles for nearly a decade. As the computing demands of its algorithms continue to increase, the company is finding that conventional processor approaches aren't keeping pace. In response, and with an eye both on vehicle autonomy and other deep learning opportunities, the company began developing its own inference acceleration engine, aiWare, at the beginning of last year. An Read more...

Synopsys Broadens Neural Network Engine IP Core Family

Last June, when Synopsys unveiled its latest-generation DesignWare EV6x vision processor core, the company also introduced an 880-MAC, 12-bit convolutional neural network (CNN) companion processor, the CNN880. Although the CNN880 is optional for Synopsys customers using the EV6x, it's been a key factor (often the lead factor, in fact) in greater than 90% of EV6x customer engagements, according to Product Marketing Manager Gordon Cooper. And although a year ago, an 880-MAC architecture was at Read more...

Xilinx's reVISION Stack Tackles Computer Vision, Machine Learning Applications

Xilinx, like many companies, sees a significant opportunity in burgeoning deep neural network applications, as well as those that leverage computer vision...often times, both at the same time. Last fall, targeting acceleration of cloud-based deep neural network inference (when a neural network analyzes new data it’s presented with, based on its previous training), the company unveiled its Reconfigurable Acceleration Stack, an application-tailored expansion of its original SDAccel development Read more...

Microsoft’s Deep Learning Toolkit Advances

Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit (formerly CNTK) is a relatively recent entrant to the open-source deep learning framework market. And, as the company's Principal Researcher Cha Zhang acknowledged in a recent briefing, it has a ways to go before it can catch up with the population of developers enjoyed by well-known alternatives such as Caffe and Google's TensorFlow. Last year's transition from Microsoft's own CodePlex open source hosting site to the more widely known GitHub repository, along with Read more...

ARM ISP IP Core Delivers Computer Vision Optimizations

ARM's latest image signal processor (ISP), the Mali-C71, marks the first fruit of the company's year-ago acquisition of Apical. Tailored to optimize images not only for human viewing but also for computer vision algorithms, the Mali-C71 provides expanded capabilities such as wide dynamic range and multi-output support (Figure 1). And, in a nod to the ADAS (advanced driver assistance) and autonomous vehicle applications that the company believes are among its near-term high-volume opportunities Read more...

Cadence Doubles Down on Deep Learning

At last year's Embedded Vision Summit, Cadence unveiled the Tensilica Vision P6 DSP, which augmented the imaging and vision processing capabilities of its predecessors with the ability to efficiently execute deep neural network (DNN) inference functions. Cadence returned to the Summit this year with a new IP offering, the Vision C5 DSP core, focused exclusively on deep neural networks. Vision C5 is intended for use alongside another core, such as the Vision P6, which will handle image signal Read more...

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...

Case Study: Using Deep Learning Techniques for Commercial Product Success

Here at BDTI, we’re working to apply deep learning techniques to a wide range of applications. Deep learning can be extremely effective—if there’s the right combination of data and processing power. The challenge to success lies in understanding how much data is sufficient and how to process it efficiently. This is where BDTI’s expertise in algorithms and architectures delivers value to our customers. Recently, BDTI was engaged to create a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify items 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...