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is the start of this year's Embedded
Vision Summit, and will run at the
Santa Clara Convention Center until
May 3. For details, click on the logo
to the right. If you are going, I will
see you there.
Over the past five years, the summit
has grown from a small meet-up to
a must-attend industry event with
80 speakers, 50 exhibitors, and over
1,000 attendees. Those numbers are
an indication of the growing interest
and importance of vision. Their
tagline says why. It is "the event
for innovators who want to bring
visual intelligence into products."
These technologies will revolutionize
transportation, but also lead to things
like security cameras that can tell the
difference between your kids fighting
and a thief, or drones that can follow
you skiing through the trees.
Tensilica Vision C5 DSP
for Neural Network
Processing
It has been said that the only
predictable thing about the British
weather is its unpredictability. Well,
the only predictable things about
neural networks is that they will
change. Obviously the highest
performance per watt comes from
designing with RTL (or perhaps even
gates). But this is also the least
amenable to change. The easiest to
change is pure software, just run
neural network code on the main CPU.
But that has no chance of achieving
either the performance or the power
budget. A specialized programmable
neural network processor is the
Goldilocks level, neither too not nor
too cold, programmable but high
performance per watt.
To give you an idea of just how fast
things are changing, in 2012 AlexNet
was the best recognition system
requiring 724M MACS/image. Today,
RESNET-152 requires over 11B (and,
of course, gets better results from
all that work). But that highlights a
big challenge for people designing
products today: how to pick an
inference platform in 2017 for a
product shipping in 2019 and perhaps
for several years afterwards. It has to
have all three of high performance,
low power, and programmability.
Picking any two of the three is easy,
but they all work against each other,
so hitting the sweet spot requires a
core designed to do all three.
Today, Cadence is announcing
just that, the newest member of
the Tensilica family, the Vision C5,
which is a neural network DSP. It
Embedded Solutions
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