It’s an exciting time for chip designer ARM as it unveils its new plans for developing machine learning processors. This new effort is another example of how artificial intelligence (AI) is seeping its way deeper into our society.
The new machine learning processor effort has been dubbed Project Trillium and the company is hopeful that these chips will become the norm when it comes to both mobile and internet of things (IoT) devices. And because these chips will run on neural networks, they’ll be the most efficient too.
“[Our] Machine Learning processor is an optimised, ground-up design for machine learning acceleration, targeting mobile and adjacent markets,” ARM commented. “The solution consists of state-of-the-art optimised fixed-function engines to provide best-in-class performance within a constrained power envelope.”
The release of the new chip comes at the same time as another great AI development – a fresh object detection chip.
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This chip is capable of detecting faces within images or videos and is the second attempt of ARM’s at making one. The first was trialled in Hive’s smart security system.
Another great feature of these AI machine learning chips is that they feature an onboard memory that stores essential information such as feature maps and weights. “[An] additional programmable layer engine supports the execution of non-convolution layers, and the implementation of selected primitives and operators, along with future innovation and algorithm generation,” said ARM.
It also confirmed that there’s also a control network unit managing the whole execution and “traversal of the network” at the same time DMA transports data from the main memory.
One thing the company has stressed about these chips is that they’re designed to run machine learning models, not train them. Anyone wanting to get their hands on one of these chips will have a bit of a wait in their hands I’m afraid. For ARM’s partners, they will receive the new chips around the summertime. For anyone else, however, they’ll be looking at around this time next year.
ARM is a semiconductor and software design company with its headquarters based in Cambridge, England that is most famous for its ARM processors. The company was formed back in 1990 and is owned by the SoftBank Group and its Vision Fund. It is one of the most well-known companies located in the so-called “Silicon Fen” and has more than 3,000 employees on its books.
Source ITPro
