New-Tech Europe | June 2017

Embedded Solutions Special Edition

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.

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.

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

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