Deep dives into AI/ML processors, NPU architecture, and the future of edge computing.
28 posts published
In the 1986 hit comedy movie Crocodile Dundee, the title character – a rough and tumble Australian transported to the mean streets of New York City – is confronted by street thugs brandishing a switchblade [...]
At some point in everyone’s teenage years of schooling we were all taught in a nature or biology class about cycles of population surges and then inevitable population collapses. Whether the example was an animal, [...]
Five or six years ago, CPU IP providers jumped into the NPU accelerator game to try to keep their CPUs relevant with a message of “use our trusted CPU and offload those pesky, compute hungry [...]
Change is constant in the AI world. Several new and complicated transformer models have emerged in the past 18 to 24 months as new “must have” networks in advanced automotive use cases. The problem is [...]
What's a VLM? Vision Language Models are a rapidly emerging class of multimodal AI models that's becoming much more important in the automotive world for the ADAS sector. VLMs are built from a combination of [...]
A common approach in the industry to building an on-device machine learning inference accelerator has relied on the simple idea of building an array of high-performance multiply-accumulate circuits – a MAC accelerator. This accelerator was [...]
If you are comparing alternatives for an NPU selection, give special attention to clearly identifying how the NPU/GPNPU will be used in your target system, and make sure the NPU/GPNPU vendor is reporting the benchmarks [...]
There are a couple of dozen NPU options on the market today. Each with competing and conflicting claims about efficiency, programmability and flexibility. One of the starkest differences among the choices is the seemingly simple [...]
The biggest mistake a chip design team can make in evaluating AI acceleration options for a new SoC is to rely entirely upon spreadsheets of performance numbers from the NPU vendor without going through the [...]
On Chimera QC Ultra it runs 28x faster than DSP+NPU ConvNext is one of today’s leading new ML networks. Frankly, it just doesn’t run on most NPUs. So if your AI/ML solution relies on an [...]
What's the biggest challenge for AI/ML? Power consumption. How are we going to meet it? In late April 2024, a novel AI research paper was published by researchers from MIT and CalTech proposing a fundamentally [...]
Not just a little slow down. A massive failure! Conventional AI/ML inference silicon designs employ a dedicated, hardwired matrix engine – typically called an “NPU” – paired with a legacy programmable processor – either a [...]
The ResNet family of machine learning algorithms, introduced to the AI world in 2015, pushed AI forward in new ways. However, today’s leading edge classifier networks – such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) family - [...]
In today’s disaggregated electronics supply chain the (1) application software developer, (2) the ML model developer, (3) the device maker, (4) the SoC design team and (5) the NPU IP vendor often work for as [...]
Wait! Didn't That Era Just Begin? The idea of transformer networks has existed since the seminal publication of the Attention is All You Need paper by Google researchers in June 2017. And while transformers quickly [...]
It Will Make for a Much Better NPU Vendor Evaluation. We've written before about the ways benchmarks for NPUs can be manipulated to the point where you just can't trust them. There are two common [...]
Llama2, YOLO Family and MediaPipe family of networks now available October 31, 2023 Quadric today delivered a Halloween treat for all registered users of the Quadric Developers' Studio. (Link). This latest update of the industry's [...]
Your Spreadsheet Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story. Thinking of adding an NPU to your next SoC design? Then you’ll probably begin the search by sending prospective vendors a list of questions, typically called an RFI [...]
In July of 1887, Carl Benz held the first public outing for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine” – the first automobile ever invented. Nine short months after the first car was publicly displayed, [...]
Graph Compilers are just getting started! The GNU C Compiler – GCC – was first released in 1987. 36 years ago. Several version streams are still actively being developed and enhanced, with GCC13 being the [...]
Transformers were first introduced by the team at Google Brain in 2017 in their paper, “Attention is All You Need“. Since their introduction, transformers have inspired a flurry of investment and research which have produced [...]
We demonstrated our Quadric Developer Studio at Embedded Vision Summit on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 22 and 23, 2023, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We'd like to say the crowds went wild, but when's [...]
A big reason purely electric car sales only reached 6% of new vehicle sales in Q3 2022 is the fear of running low on battery power and the lack of readily available fast-charging infrastructure. This [...]
With the passage of time, Fallback only gets worse. ML models are rapidly evolving, so the reference models of 2022 or 2023 will be replaced with newer, more accurate and more complex ML models in [...]
Quadric's GPNPU delivers benefits to both SoC developers and downstream software programmers, speeding both chip design and application development. Why Chip Designers Need a General Purpose Neural Processing Unit (GPNPU) The Rise of AI in [...]
In this blog post, quadric explores the acceleration of the Non-Maximal Suppression (NMS) algorithm used by object detection neural networks such as Tiny Yolo V3. We dive into the challenges of accelerating NMS, and why [...]
The story of our brand. The quadric Concept What is a quadric? And what’s with the logo? People ask this quite often. I wanted to put down a few thoughts on the matter and tie [...]
