Processor

DeepX is to start production of its DX-M1 neural processor unit IC in the second quarter of this year, according to the company, which claims for it “the highest power-efficiency and performance efficiency in the world”. The company has published ResNet-50 figures in support of these claims: >10Top/s/W and 60frame/s/Top/s. Total capability per IC is 25Top/s. It is due to ...

Frore Systems has chosen Nvidia’s Jetson Orin Nano Super single-board computer as the latest platform on which to demonstrate its novel ‘solid-state’ cooling ‘fans’. This version of the mems-based air shifter, PAK 5C-25, measures 100 x 65 x 9.8mm and can remove up to 25W of heat, according to Frore, meeting the needs of the 67Top/s (INT8) Orin Nano Super ...

Mediatek has adopted Arm’s top-end Cortex-X925 CPU in its second-generation ‘all big core’ phone processor – Dimensity 9400, made by TSMC on a 3nm process. The X925 runs at up to 3.63GHz and has 2Mbyte of L2 cache, and shares the IC with three Cortex-X4 cores (1Mbyte L2 cache) and four Cortex-A720 cores (512kbyte L2 cache). These all share 12Mbyte ...

The third generation of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) by Quadric introduces pre-integrated clusters of two, four or eight cores to deliver up to 108 TOPS. This latest iteration has increased performance and optimisations for generative AI. the company has also introduced a safety enhanced version for automotive applications. The company described the Chimera QC series as NPUs with a ...

Ceva has announced a neural network processing core aimed at SoCs needing to run TinyML models. There are two versions: NPN32 with 32 int8 MACs NPN64 with 64 int8 MACs “Both of which benefit from Ceva-NetSqueeze for direct processing of compressed model weights,” according to the company. “NPN32 is optimised for most TinyML workloads targeting voice, audio, object detection and ...

AI chip maker Hailo has introduced a 208Top/s PCIe processor card for implementing neural networks, and an entry-level version of its Halio-8 IC. The PCIe cards, called ‘Hailo-8 Century’, execute at 400frame/s/W on the ResNet50 benchmark model, said the company, and the highest-performance version can run the same benchmark at 10,000frame/s. Versions start at 52Top/s, and video processing applications are ...

iWave Systems has collaborated with Texas Instruments to create a solderable system-on-module powered by automotive-grade AM62Ax Sitara processors – which are nominally vision processors. Meeting the 45 x 45mm 622pad LGA OSM v1.1 solderable standard, the module is called iW-RainboW-G55M. Courtesy of the TI IC, it has quad 1.4GHz Arm Cortex-A53 CPU cores, an 800MHz Cortex-R5F (MPU channel with FFI), ...

A recent innovation at ISSCC is for the organisers to hand-pick a few ICs that they would like to hear about the conference – all the other speakers have to apply to present their innovations. This year they picked machine learning accelerators for both training and inference, an ultra-high bandwidth chip-to-chip link and an ‘infrastructure processing unit’ (IPU) for off-loading ...

It takes a lot of effort to avoid machine learning processors at this year’s IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, as they popped up not only amongst digital processing papers, but also next to memory and analogue papers. For example, of all the thousands of companies designing ICs around the world, only four were invited to describe their latest finished products ...

MediaTek has announced 6nm processors aimed at 5G mobile phones. Dimensity 920 includes hardware-based 4K HDR video capture, supporting up to four concurrent cameras and sensors up to 108Mpixel, and the company is claiming a 9% boost in gaming performance compared to its Dimensity 900 predecessor. An octa-core Arm Cortex-A78 running at up to 2.5GHz is at the heart of its processing, ...