Sensors, AI, Tiny Power in a Turnkey Board.

Sensors, AI, Tiny Power in a Turnkey Board.
by Bernard Murphy on 07-10-2020 at 6:00 am

Eta Compute ECM3532 AI Sensor Board Top

Got a great idea for a device with AI at the extreme edge? Self-contained and can run on a coin cell battery, maybe even harvested energy? Needs to fit in a space not much larger than a quarter? Eta Compute has a board for you. This comes with 2 MEMS microphones, a pressure/temperature sensor, a 6-axis MEMS accelerometer/gyroscope,… Read More


Arm Rings the Bell in Supercomputing

Arm Rings the Bell in Supercomputing
by Bernard Murphy on 07-08-2020 at 6:00 am

Fugaku

Late last year I wrote about Arm’s efforts to play a role in servers, in AWS, and particularly Arm-based supercomputing, in the Sandia Astra roadmap and in partnering with NVIDIA who are in the Oak Ridge Summit supercomputer. These steps came, at least for me, with an implicit “Good for them, playing a role on the edges of these challenging… Read More


What’s New in Verdi? Faster Debug

What’s New in Verdi? Faster Debug
by Bernard Murphy on 07-02-2020 at 6:00 am

Verdi Unified Debug

Want fast debug? Synopsys recently hosted a Webinar to show off the latest and greatest improvements to Verdi® in performance, memory demand and multi-tasking, among other areas.

Performance improvements
Taruna Reddy (PMM) and Allen Hsieh (Staff apps) presented features of the latest version, released in March – Taruna started… Read More


Qualcomm on Power Estimation, Optimizing for Gaming on Mobile GPUs

Qualcomm on Power Estimation, Optimizing for Gaming on Mobile GPUs
by Bernard Murphy on 06-30-2020 at 6:00 am

Phone game

I don’t look at the RTL power estimation topic too often these days, so I was interested to see that ANSYS still has a very strong position in this area. Qualcomm is using PowerArtist on one of the most demanding modern applications – mobile GPU power gaming. Mobile gaming heavily loads the GPU, so any optimization in that area will … Read More


Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited

Why Go Custom in AI Accelerators, Revisited
by Bernard Murphy on 06-24-2020 at 6:00 am

frame interpolation

I believe I asked this question a year or two ago and answered it for the absolute bleeding edge of datacenter performance – Google TPU and the like. Those hyperscalars (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, etc) who want to do on-the-fly recognition in pictures so they can tag friends in photos, do almost real-time machine… Read More


Where’s the Value in Next-Gen Cars?

Where’s the Value in Next-Gen Cars?
by Bernard Murphy on 06-17-2020 at 6:00 am

money

Value chains can be very robust and seemingly unbreakable – until they’re not. One we’ve taken for granted for many years is the chain for electronics systems in cars. The auto OEM, e.g. Toyota, gets electronics module from a Tier-1 supplier such as Denso. They, in turn, build their modules using chips from a semiconductor chip maker… Read More


Predicting Bugs: ML and Static Team Up. Innovation in Verification

Predicting Bugs: ML and Static Team Up. Innovation in Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 06-11-2020 at 6:00 am

innovation

Can we predict where bugs are most likely to be found, to better direct testing? Paul Cunningham (GM of Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan and I continue our series on novel research ideas, again through a paper in software verification we find equally relevant to hardware. Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree.

The InnovationRead More


WEBINAR: Adnan on Challenges in Security Verification

WEBINAR: Adnan on Challenges in Security Verification
by Bernard Murphy on 06-09-2020 at 6:00 am

security testing

Adnan Hamid, CEO of Breker, has an interesting background. He was born in China to diplomat parents in the Bangladesh embassy. After I’m sure an equally interesting childhood, he got his BSEE/CS at Princeton. Where, like most of us he had to make money on the side, in his case working for a professor in the Psych lab on artificial intelligence… Read More


Arm Reinforces the Mobile Fortress

Arm Reinforces the Mobile Fortress
by Bernard Murphy on 06-02-2020 at 6:00 am

Arm Mobile 2020 Announcement

Arm did it again. They continue to press their advantage, most recently with an announcement on their 2020 release of cores for mobile applications, in Cortex-A, in what they now call Cortex-X custom cores, in Mali GPUs and in the next generation of their Ethos neural net core.

Paul Williamson, VP GM of the client line of business,… Read More


What a Difference an Architecture Makes: Optimizing AI for IoT

What a Difference an Architecture Makes: Optimizing AI for IoT
by Bernard Murphy on 05-28-2020 at 6:00 am

HLS PPA results

Last week Mentor hosted a virtual event on designing an AI accelerator with HLS, integrating it together with an Arm Corstone SSE-200 platform and characterizing/optimizing for performance and power. Though in some ways a recap of earlier presentations, there were some added insights in this session, particularly in characterizing… Read More