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> . The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, Is this a real IC/processor for arbitrary software or an abstraction of an underlying GPU/DSP?
by wyldfire 9y ago
> . The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine,
Is this a real IC/processor for arbitrary software or an abstraction of an underlying GPU/DSP?
- mtgx 9y agoMost likely some kind of dedicated deep learning accelerator. This is coming with or without Apple: > Exynos 8895 features VPU (Vision Processing Unit) which is designed for machine vision technology. This technology improves the recognition of an item or its movements by analyzing the visual information coming through the camera. Furthermore, it enables advanced features such as corner detection that is frequently used in motion detection, image registration, video tracking and object recognition. http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/Exynos/w/solution/mod_ap/8895/ http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/Exynos/w/solut... > New Vision Processing Unit (VPU) paired to the Image Signal Processors (ISP) that provides a dedicated processing platform for numerous camera features, freeing up the CPU and GPU and saving power. https://www.mediatek.com/products/smartphones/mediatek-helio-x30 https://www.mediatek.com/products/smartphones/mediatek-helio... I was also hoping that with Google's high-efficiency for the TPU, they would make a version for mobile as well, at least for their Pixel phones. I guess they still might, but the fact that the TPU2 does both training and inference makes me think they won't do that anytime soon anymore. The biggest reasons why I like this "mobile AI chips" trend is that they can give you back some privacy, if the data can be analyzed locally without going to the vendors' servers, and I think they will also boost the capabilities of computational photography. No more spying toys for kids, etc.
- protomyth 9y agoWhat does the instruction set look like on that? Is there another example out of this type of chip?
- MBCook 9y agoGoogle has their Tensor Flow. chips, I would imagine it is similar.
- protomyth 9y agoIs there released documentation on the instruction set of the Google Cloud TPU?
- pjscott 9y agoThey list the main ones on pages 3-4 of this paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx4hafXDDq2EMzRNcy1vSUxtcEk/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx4hafXDDq2EMzRNcy1vSUxtcEk... It's mainly moving memory around, matrix multiplication, convolution, and applying activation functions (sigmoid, tanh, relu, etc.). Very simple, high-level stuff. This has the handy side-effect of making timing very predictable, which makes the latency a lot more deterministic.
- binocarlos 9y agoNo idea what instruction set the Apple device uses but Google just announced alpha access to their Tensorflow Processing Unit: https://cloud.google.com/tpu/ https://cloud.google.com/tpu/ on Google cloud
- indy 9y ago> I was also hoping that with Google's high-efficiency for the TPU, they would make a version for mobile as well At Google IO there was a slide during the keynote that they're working with Mediatek to produce a mobile TPU
- samstave 9y agoI wish they would have called it Apple Neural Technology, so we could start referring to the devices as ANTs and Hives and Colonies as we build out Richard Hendrick's new decentralized internet.